The two sections of The Resonance Around Us offer some of Penny Harter’s most evocative and insightful poems. The lyrics in the first section, “The Resonance Around Us,” introduce themes picked up and responded to by the haibun in the second section, “The Great Blue.” Whether crafting her poems around memories, dreams, or daily rituals, Harter offers a poetic exploration of what it means to live in, and leave, this world. The book is designed by Jonathan Greene and features a photograph by artist Dobree Adams on the cover.

Praise for The Resonance Around Us

Penny Harter spins her poems from all she holds dear:

flesh, stone, water falling through the sky. She praises the

opening and closing mouth of a tulip, the black skein of

starlings across the highway and her grandson’s infant

voice rising and falling ‘holy in the hypnotic dark.’ And

in her haibun (a Japanese form of poetry combining prose

and haiku) we find a master poet, like the fortune tellers

of old, looking into palms and finding stars.

—Terry Ann Carter

League of Canadian Poets

President, Haiku Canada

Lyrical and evocative, the poems in Penny Harter’s The

Resonance Around Us continue to resonate within the

reader long after the closing poem. Her language is at once

delicate and profound, with memorable surprises. Precise

sensory details open possibilities of mystical connection.

Love resonates throughout—in childhood memories, the

nature of our planet, and shared moments with her late

husband. The Resonance Around Us vibrates with living

music.

—Charlotte Mandel

author of Life Work

The Resonance Around Us

As we walk through this field, coarse grasses

vibrate around our ankles. Listen, we are already

in the sky, its rising glissando trembling in the

hollows of our bones—our bones that might be

wind chimes hanging from the trees, clattering

like a hard rain.

Tonight it will snow, each crystal a tuning fork

for the other, each of our upturned faces echoing

the quiet ticking flakes that home on us.

Even those things we deem silent—dead weeds

nodding by the barn, the piles the horses drop

as they drift through the pasture, steam rising

from each before it cools—even these

are singing in their spheres.

Listen, and you might hear the choir of atoms,

those unseen constellations that make flesh,

flickering on and o as they resonate with

the dead who float beside us, their substance

oscillating faster than we apprehend.

Just now some bird that knows the notes

of twilight opened its beak to offer a brief

harmony, and as the dark descends in solemn

chords, a chorus of plum clouds begins to hum

on Earth’s horizon.

Winter Stars

My neighbor fills her winter garden with oaktag cut-outs of red and

yellow stars—hangs them from her bird feeder or glues them atop the

planting sticks she’s left in the dirt between withered blooms. Yesterday,

she knocked on my door, and I opened it to find her hands overflowing

with stars—each hole-punched and threaded with yarn—a new constellation

for these days of early dark.

‘These are for you to hang places,’ she said simply, knowing of my need

for joy this Christmas season. As we smiled and hugged one another, I

received them in my cupped hands. Now stars dangle from my doorknobs

and brighten shadowed corners—an unexpected gift of light.

moon splinters

on the river—the glint

of ice floes

From the lovely color, photo and title of the cover, to the wonderful
poems inside, I have entered your world, and found much that resonates! Some I have read or heard--such as the last poem, "One Bowl," which I dearly love --
others especially moving to me are "The Great Blue," "After and Because," and of course, your beautiful title poem. I could go on and on, but I'll stop with those --
it really is an extraordinary book!

Antoinette Libro Poet & Professor Emerita, Rowan University