Publications
Here is information about my recent
books and links to sample texts from them and other publications.
Clicking on a cover image will take you to a page where you can
purchase that book. If you have questions, you are welcome
to contact me. Thanks for stopping by! Penny Harter |
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The Night Marsh
WordTech Editions, Cincinnati, Ohio, 2008.
See sample poems and a review here and on the publisher's web site. More poems from The Night Marsh may be found on other sites: three in the Fall 2007 issue of Umbrella, two in the June 2008 issue of Contemporary American Voices, one in the Fall/Winter 2007–2008 issue of Valparaiso Poetry Review. (Each opens in new window or tab. Links to more of my poems online are at Read My Work Online, as well as linked from the various book descriptions below.)
"The Night Marsh is a beautiful collection, rich and deep, by a poet able to communicate truths that almost go beyond words. Several of the poems convey astonishing spiritual experiences (see 'Voices,' 'Diffusion,' 'Translating the Sky on the Morning of My Birthday,' 'One Moonless Night,' and more). In other poems, Penny Harter intimately confronts the natural world; and often, high moments of her life, and our lives, between death and childhood, are memorably held fast."
—X. J. Kennedy
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Along River Road
From Here Press, Summit, New Jersey, 2005.
Poems (click this link for samples).
"What wonderful, moving poems in Along River Road. So many memories, some so painful, as in the astounding 'Flies on the Corn,' many so beautiful, . . . and 'Burying Mother's Ashes,' with the delightful snapshot of your charming three-year-old granddaughter. A memorable book!" — Dorothy McLaughlin
"In her collection Along River Road, Penny Harter offers a 'translation of
remembered rooms' combining memories that rage and smoulder like 'those
underground fires / they can't put out for years' with childhood innocence—'where now is our mingled breath / that steamed the windowpanes?' Harter
gives back to what is lost, reminds us all of the things that 'wash up, / slip
under and emerge to shine again.'" — Terry Ann Carter
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Eleven of the poems in Buried in the Sky are part of a selection of Penny's work that appears in American Nature Writing 2002. Her contribution to this anthology received the first William O. Douglas Nature Writing Award.
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Buried in the Sky
La Alameda Press, Albuquerque, New Mexico, 2001.
Poems (click this link for samples).
"Penny Harter's Buried in the Sky
combines the breathtaking images and language of a gifted poet with the
precise eye and cosmic consciousness of a scientist." — Chet Raymo
"Of light, flesh and the sheen of daily life, these poems speak with
eloquence, and exquisite measured grace—then a wind from another world
sweeps through these crafted moments and we plummet into strong and
strange blue depths where the natural world crosses and recrosses into
the sacred." — Judyth Hill
"Harter thoughtfully explores the importance of place to the human
spirit and to the creative artist. The geography of the imagination,
the confluence of choice, the vagaries of wild and human nature—all
are given consideration in her poems. In the poem "Pelvis With Moon,
1943," inspired by the well-known oil painting by Georgia O'Keeffe,
Harter writes of a bone in the desert that had 'fallen from some
female' and that had once 'cradled her young.' In her poem, as in the
painting, the bone becomes a powerful symbol, inspiring an epiphany
that evokes both the myth of Mother Earth and the interdependence of
all life." — John Murray
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Lizard Light: Poems from the Earth
Sherman Asher Publishing, Santa Fe, New Mexico, 1998.
Click this link for sample poems.
"In poems like 'The Milky Way' and 'Lizard Light' Penny Harter has
clearly established herself as one of America's finest living poets.
Her work is full of vigor, optimism, and amazing beauty." — John Murray
"'We are always trying to enter the earth,' begins the poem called 'Ruins,' and in Lizard Light
Penny Harter beams back to those of us sadly on the periphery a series
of heartfelt communiqués about what we're missing, and cannot
afford to miss much longer, as we spiral tremulously from one
millennium into the next." — Thomas Centolella
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Turtle Blessing was an Editors' Choice book in the January/February 1998
issue of The Bloomsbury Review.
The citation reads, in part, "Penny Harter is the real thing—a gifted
poet in the tradition of Gary Snyder, Wendell Berry, Robert Penn
Warren, Theodore Roethke . . . this book is extraordinary."
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Turtle Blessing
La Alameda Press, Albuquerque, New Mexico, 1996.
Poems (click this link for samples).
"With minute insight into life's precious web, Penny Harter reinstates
our 'mother tongue' & walks us into a garden—not mythological, but
real—where stones sing, worms hear, whales call, fog 'leaves scales on
our limbs' & sun fills our bones with a melody at once ancient, at
once new." — John Brandi
"Turtle Blessing
depicts relationships between humans, animals and nature in their most
honest form. The results are delightful and disturbing; they are
simultaneously commonplace and tremendous." — Willow Older, writing in Pasatiempo, The Santa Fe New Mexican
Penny Harter sings us back to the center of things, to the heart, where
everything speaks. Through her poems we try to regain 'the old way of
moving on earth', where we find our way back into the conversation,
back into the real community life. Here we find the blessings of
turtle, deer, skunk, rock and water. We are blessed with the language
of light, 'we are learning the planet by ear', and our hearts have been
changed." — Gary Lawless
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Grandmother's Milk
Singular Speech Press, Canton, Connecticut, 1995.
Poems (click on this link for samples).
"Remembrance is at the heart of Penny Harter's newest collection. The
milk of human sensitivity for others flows through these poems." — Geraldine C. Little
"There
is something to love or tremble for in every line that I read. I look
forward to reading it again and again." — Naomi Shihab Nye
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Shadow Play: Night Haiku
Illustrated by Jeffrey Greene
Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers, New York City, 1994.
Click on this link to see sample pages.
"Harter evokes nighttime in a series of haiku poems that capture its
sound, shadows, and muted colors. . . . The night is alive with
movement, and with light, in this stunning book." — Kirkus Reviews
"A thread of gentle humor runs through this thoughtful, successful evocation of night's pleasures." — John Peters, in School Library Journal
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Stages and Views
Katydid Books, Santa Fe, New Mexico, 1994.
Poems (click on this link for samples).
"These disciplined and fragrant verses evoke the everlasting beauty of
the masters Hiroshige and Hokusai. Penny Harter has embraced the spirit
of Japanese poetry with skill and enthusiasm, and married it to her own
American sensibility." — Carolyn Kizer
"It's
a wonderfully unified book—from the carefully crafted progression of
'Stages' to the stretching and disjunctive music of 'Views.' It makes
me think of that Muriel Rukeyser poem about swimmers, about how, below
surface, 'it all touches.'" — Arthur Sze
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