These Intricacies

By David Harrity

These Intricacies is a book of poems traversing the intersection of family, fatherhood, and faith. Set in shifting, vibrant spaces of a rich Kentucky landscape, and wrought with metaphysical crisis, this collection charts the slow, seismic shifts of growth bound up in understanding the nature of home. Dangling between struggle and tranquility, the poems in These Intricacies evoke a contemplative exploration of masculinity and vocation as the poet and reader journey together to discover and dissolve the discontinuities of how we are loved and how we can love others.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Release date: Oct 1, 2015
• ISBN: 9781498236942

David Harrity

Dave Harrity travels the United States teaching workshops on contemplative living, imagination and poetry. His work has appeared in Memorious, Revolver, Killing the Buddha, The Los Angeles Review, Confrontation, Softblow and elsewhere. He is the author of the poetry craft and spirituality manual Making Manifest: On Faith, Creativity, and the Kingdom at Hand (2013) and two books of poetry, These Intricacies (Cascade Books, 2015) and Our Father in the Year of the Wolf (Word Farm, 2016). An assistant professor of English at Campbellsville University, and a recipient of the William Alexander II and Lisa Percy Fellowship at the Rivendell Writers' Colony, he lives in Louisville, Kentucky, with his wife and children.

Book preview

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These Intricacies

Dave Harrity

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These Intricacies

The Poiema Poetry Series

Copyright ©

2015

Dave Harrity. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical publications or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Write: Permissions, Wipf and Stock Publishers,

199

W.

8

th Ave., Suite

3

, Eugene, OR

97401

.

Cascade Books

An Imprint of Wipf and Stock Publishers

199

W.

8

th Ave., Suite

3

Eugene, OR

97401

www.wipfandstock.com

ISBN

13

:

978

-

1

-

4982

-

3693

-

5

EISBN

13

:

978-1-4982-3694-2

Cataloging-in-Publication data:

Dave Harrity.

These Intricacies / Dave Harrity.

58

p. + ix ;

23

cm—

The Poiema Poetry Series

ISBN

13

:

978

-

1

-

4982

-

3693

-

5

1

. American Poetry—

21

st Century I. Title II. Series

PS3725.A237 2015

Manufactured in the USA.

Table of Contents

Title Page

1

Naming the Stars

In January

The Jilted Husband Speaks

Slave Wall

The Hole

Contemplating the Egg

My Grandfather Sings Again

Atropos

The Shuttle

At Cave Hill Cemetery

Northern Cross

Where Shadows Come From

Fathom

You are Sitting in the Kitchen, Only a Witness

Loving Thy Neighbor

Etymology

On Prayer #1

2

Novena

3

On Prayer #2

Was Blind

Hallelujah, I’m a Bum

Trigger

To Mark the Place

Confession

Natural Order

Ghost Story

From the Hammock

Quanta

Bluegrass Winter View

Pantoum Breakfast Scrabble

At Spofford Lake

Poem to Usher in the Season

At Pleasant Hill to Visit Shakertown

After Chuck’s Zen Garden

Your Days Are Waiting

Acknowledgements / Notes

This collection of elemental Kentucky poems will land ‘like starlight in your throat.’ You will want to sing Dave Harrity aloud to find that words have wombs," that what he calls the dusk in our bodies, our ‘cairns of guilt,’ still birth and mark dim paths of light. These Intricacies will clear a way into your own and leave you grateful for each twist and sudden turn. Like St. Augustine, ‘Take and read.’"

—Paul Willis author of Say This Prayer into the Past

"In these poems, Dave Harrity invites us—into the poems, yes, but also into thought and quiet and a contemplative solitude rare in our century. Here is a poet attentive to the worlds beyond us and the worlds within us. Here are poems that appreciate creation’s perfection and life’s imperfection. These Intricacies reveals stars and stone walls and kitchen windows—those things I thought I already knew—with unfamiliar and welcome clarity."

—Lynn Domina author of Framed in Silence

"Intricate only begins to describe the delicate, strong, interlaced qualities of Dave Harrity’s poems. Because he values this world in all its complexity, Harrity refuses to reduce any part