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