Description
- Kind: Perfect
- Pages: 304
- Language: English
- Published: December. 2012
- ISBN: Perfectbound – 978-1-933675-85-5
Praise
Richard Hague is a naturalist who comes from a landscape that has suffered the systematic removal of Nature. “I come here to commune/ with nothing,” he says in one poem. Indeed, the ever-present industrial and chemical waste littering the southeastern Ohio Hague chronicles, suggests the awful darkness of nothing. This is a world of carnage and the great diminishment of human hope; from strip mines and steel mills smoking in their prime to the wreckage of their leavings, Hague summons the courage to speak against the ruin. He speaks for the wild things and their place, and he speaks for the people who live with profound and unrelenting loss. This is the land and these are the people who have paid the highest price for the so-called benefits and conveniences of modern American life. What we have given up in trade is incalculable. The poems in this generous collection, therefore, are wonders of bravery; they come from the ancient spirit of poetry whose task is to name, to say, and to make account, and to bring the ruined world into burnishing contact with beauty. —Maurice Manning
Since I first met Richard Hague in 1978 he has carved for himself an honored place among American poets. He has been faithful to his talent and used it well. He is a major and indispensible voice of the Ohio River Valley and the surrounding Appalachian mountain region. Through his poetry and other writings Richard offers his knowing insights into the pain, humor and complexities of human life. We receive his knowledge of the details of the natural world, his local social world and his array of vivid characters and their true voices with appreciation and much affection. —Gurney Norman
Excerpt
Luna Moth
Come a hundred miles
across the Appalachians,
it follows some creek of scent
no wider than my hand.
On an upwind stump,
miles out Cranesnest,
a female clings to barkshards,
pulsing her perfume.
Tonight,
something inside me
wants to fly,
wants to turn into the wind,
my body as light as a star,
my wings like the clavicles of ghosts,
lifting, lifting.
Author
Richard Hague is a native of Steubenville, Ohio, and author of twelve collections of poetry, including Ripening (The Ohio State University Press, l984) for which he was named Co-Poet of the Year in Ohio, Possible Debris (Cleveland State University Poetry Center, l988) and Alive in Hard Country (Bottom Dog Press, 2003) which was named 2004 Appalachian Poetry Book of the Year. His Milltown Natural: Essays and Stories From A Life was nominated for a National Book Award. His most recent books are Learning How: Stories, Yarns & Tales (Bottom Dog Press 2010) and Public Hearings (Word Press, 2009).
