These Intricacies
Dave Harrity
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. 8th Ave., Suite 3, Eugene, OR 97401.
Cascade Books
An Imprint of Wipf and Stock Publishers
199 W. 8th 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—21st Century I. Title II. Series
PS3725.A237 2015
Manufactured in the USA.
“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 of creation to a single feature. Each poem here is a complex weaving of poetic attention—image, voice, line, diction, and, especially, tone—into an honest, lamenting, desiring voice that embodies the human necessity ‘to turn away the dark, / to call down light from stars.’”
—David Wright author of The Small Books of Bach and A Liturgy for Stones
“Dave Harrity metes out his keen sense of our material reality in These Intricacies with an undeniable spirit-eye: a gun shop houses beasts, the throat starlight; guilt builds a little cairn, belief a hand of wings; the body makes room for dusk but cannot deny its uncertain history—those ‘many accidents it took to make this skin.’ I’m punctured by all that’s hallowed and harsh in these poems. What’s more: I’m thankful.”
—Susanna Childress author of Jagged with Love and Entering the House of Awe
“Dave Harrity’s These Intricacies is a welcomed new voice in American poetry for the muscle and soul and lyric vision it offers us. Not may poets today will write a long, complex line of questioning, digging, and seeking visceral answers to spiritual questions, ways to bury doubt or reveal belief, as Harrity does. His point of view as a young man, a husband, father, teacher, and above all a seeker of truth in our very human contemporary lives, is one I recommend to you through these poems. The comfort and confidence I feel in his lines reminds me of mid-twentieth-century voices such as a Richard Hugo, James Wright, and John Anderson with the Songs of David weaving throughout. Harrity is an original who wants to know, fights to understand the world he finds himself in, and this is the driving engine of his poetics. There is nothing fragmented or partial here, no blurts of thought, but kneaded considerations few poets take the time to write these days. When he says ‘I’ll grind the grain if it means I’ll see your face,’ I feel his love for his tortured fellow humans, and I know that turning anywhere in this book, I will find an answer, even if buried deep. I highly recommend, especially to our younger generation of poets, Dave Harrity’s poetry which has something to say that is real, substantial, and above all uplifting in a time when we need this so.”
—Jeanie Thompson author of the forthcoming The Myth of Water: Poems from the Life of Helen Keller
The Poiema Poetry Series
Poems are windows into worlds; windows into beauty, goodness, and truth; windows into understandings that won’t twist themselves into tidy dogmatic statements; windows into experiences. We can do more than merely peer into such windows; with a little effort we can fling open the casements, and leap over the sills into the heart of these worlds. We are also led into familiar places of hurt, confusion, and disappointment, but we arrive in the poet’s company. Poetry is a partnership between poet and reader, seeking together to gain something of value—to get at something important.
Ephesians 2:10 says, “We are God’s workmanship . . .” poiema in Greek—the thing that has been made, the masterpiece, the poem. The Poiema Poetry Series presents the work of gifted poets who take Christian faith seriously, and demonstrate in whose image we have been made through their creativity and craftsmanship.
These poets are recent participants in the ancient tradition of David, Asaph, Isaiah, and John the Revelator. The thread can be followed through the centuries—through the diverse poetic visions of Dante, Bernard of Clairvaux, Donne, Herbert, Milton, Hopkins, Eliot, R. S. Thomas, and Denise Levertov—down to the poet whose work is in your hand. With the selection of this volume you are entering this enduring tradition, and as a reader contributing to it.
—D.S. Martin
Series Editor
For Amanda, Emmalynne, & Gabriel—still our lives.
NAMING THE STARS
To know that there’s room enough for dusk in the body,
step out in open air and breathe—the day downing.
What it is to end is what begins us each time over.
A walk to think it over—the hour when day slips off
and crumples like the linen of a summer dress
to reveal the forms that humble us.
There’s a word to say for each imperfection we possess,
for failures making good on even smaller promises,
to beat back times we entertain our little wrongs.
And what it must be like to turn away the dark,
to call down light from stars—poverties we have
hung bare, a constant grain for each of these mistakes.
IN JANUARY
There are words I seem to only say with you,
but I try to pray in spite of that. I say them
as I walk this cut bank by the creek,
as the morning’s ice storm shines
like all the words you use to talk to God.
I bow to silver trees, to white fire glazing bright
and what the new snow hides beneath—
shallow