LOYALTY
By Henry Braun
Loyalty is a full book and a very precise one. In its 123 pages and almost 80 poems, there is no verbiage or padding, only exact lines with perfect line breaks, over and over.
Braun has made his own delicate but strong forms to fit his tireless delight in our world’s particulars as well as in its big themes such as war, nature, and how a poet learns to take his place in literature (witness the book’s many dedications.) Braun sees himself in a bardic role, one with Homer and Milton.
Nothing human is alien here. “ All in the family, different families / sound the surface of the skin / worn so separately in common.” In Braun’s world we are single yet joined under what he calls “our human nature’s sky.”
We are also woven into the natural world and inseparable from it. Among other things, Braun is a poet of delight and joy and this is nowhere more evident than in his nature poems which tend to be simpler and more straightforward than those that deal with humanity and its more complex creations. “Spruce and fir / tall in the dooryard / give themselves over / storylessly.” In another poem: “Trees! / A fashion show of towers / of Being needled, leaved and flowered.”
Braun is as planted in this world as he is in the brainy, sometimes happily manic world of his wide ranging and ever curious mind. His words, lines and poems form a durable, buoyant bridge between the two.
Praise for Henry Braun's Loyalty: New and Selected Poems
2008 Maine Literary Awards Winner for Poetry
For film clips of Henry reading his poetry and talking about his life, click here. Not to be missed!
“The poems are strong, impressive, learned without needing to be scholarly; loving and often surprising in the way they pull a conclusion out of darkness. . . . The work is very rich and diverse, although [he] keeps to his style faithfully. . . . [His] style is there, very solid—and bless it! . . . Wonderfully concise bringing together of wonder, closeness and immense distances!”
—Nathaniel Tarn
"I love the sweet clarity of [his] lines, their poise, their exact just-enoughness. . . . And here’s blessings for [his] political poems, the Whitmanesque celebration of “Shock and Awe”, the best response to atrocity, yes, is to celebrate life in the face of it—, and that memorable line, which is the clearest definition of our difference as a species: “the only animal that runs towards fire.”
—Eleanor Wilner
"Poetry too good to be gulped, it is to be relished, to be read slowly and many times. I am so happy to own this beautiful collection! . . . What did Thoreau say about the cost of any great work, that it cost a lifetime? It’s an extraordinary lifetime that we feel in this book. . . . What tremendous tact [his] poems all show, never a word too much, nothing insisted on, a light touch that looks easy, but, I think, takes tremendous art to achieve.”
—Kate Barnes, former Maine Poet Laureate
“A handsome, comprehensive, moving book.”
—Toby Olson
“[Braun's] sensibility is a remarkable alert one. I find myself reading poems again and again as they keep coming to life in new ways.”
—Baron Wormser, former Maine Poet Laureate
“An accumulation of resonances…delicious lineation…how many of these poems are ars poeticae. Or how many slip through a brilliantly quiet image, from the outer world to the inner. . . . Profound thanks to [this] mercurial poet who conjured “unimagined joy” in this “unprepossessing wilderness.”
—Marion Stocking