Matthew C. Nickel's latest volume out with Five Oaks Press

Matthew C. Nickel's latest volume of poems, The Route to Cacharel, has been published by Five Oaks Press.

Praise for The Route to Cacharel
    Throughout The Route to Cacharel, Nickel poses a central question: “the dead speak if we listen, but how do we hear them in the cackling of the modern world?” The answer is found in the particulars of the natural world. Spiritual yet visceral, these powerful poems offer comfort: “There is someone whispering over a candle perhaps for you too.” If as Nickel observes, “in the end, we are measured by our generosity,” this magnificent collection lights not just one but a multitude of candles to guide us in the dark.
      ~Vivian Shipley, author of The Poet and Perennial
 

    Like one of its characters, The Route to Cacharel balances “the knowing with the longing.” Here is history and yearning amid the vividly rendered but insufficient pleasures of the present. “We are unable to resign ourselves to the end / Of what we love”—yes. These ambitious poems offer things to savor, things to grieve, and much, much to ponder.
      ~Ron Smith, Poet Laureate of Virginia and author of Its Ghostly Workshop, Moon Road, 

      and Running Again in Hollywood Cemetery

You can order The Route to Cacharel here.

Stoneback's new book: The Stones of Strasbourg

 H. R. Stoneback's new volume from Codhill Press: 

The Stones of Strasbourg & Other Poems

More on recent books by H. R. Stoneback

About Homage: A Letter to Robert Penn Warren
“The poem is a delight, a great read, a rumble of energy all the way through…the rhythmic
roll and strut. and the details of the lives braided together.”
    — Dave Smith, poet, Coleman Professor of Poetry, Johns Hopkins U., past editor The Southern  
    Review
 
“I was blown away by the art and power of the thing…what an intertextual tour de force
it is!”
    —William Bedford Clark, poet, Editor of 6-volume Warren Correspondence Project


About Why Athletes Prefer Cheerleaders

“H. R. Stoneback’s recent collection, Why Athletes Prefer Cheerleaders, is a singular
experience. Every one of these poems epitomizes Pound’s old modernist maxim—that
poetry should be at least as well written as prose. Drawn together from over fifty years of
writing, the book is not only a great gathering of poems about sport; it’s a deep sampling
of Stoneback’s voice. Basketball, baseball, zellball, swimming, diving, walking, fishing,
boules—sure, you will find all these sports (and more) invoked. But there’s something
else going on here too:
Down the great winds at work over the roofs of the land
Down the singing maze of the horror of living
Down the wringing wrists of the honor of living
Down the winding abyss... (“Fast Break”)
These are poems rapt by the mysteries of courtside chants and yellowing scorecards,
the glories of place and travel. From “In Those Same Sad Old Churches in Camden” and
“Marrowbone Creek: Sunday Noon” (written in the early 1960s) to the strange twentyfirst-
century country of Australia, New Zealand, and Tahiti, you will hear one man’s voice
telling the holy and broken story of what it has meant to live in the body, in place, in
time. There is nothing like it.”
    —Alex Shakespeare, poet and scholar, Skidmore College


About Amazing-Grace-Wheelchair-Jumpshot-Jesus-Love-Poems

“What I love about Stoneback’s poetry is that it makes you love poetry…He’s a bard,
celebratory and rhythmical, with an unmistakable voice and he gets and begets the numinous
nature of poiesis.”  
    —Allen Josephs, writer, University of West Florida

“[Stoneback is a] Postmodern modernist extraordinaire!”
    —John R. O. Gery, poet, Director Ezra Pound Center for Literature

Matthew Nickel: THE LEEK SOUP SONGBOOK

New from 

Des Hymnagistes Press:

The Leek Soup Songbook 

by Matthew Nickel

The Leek Soup Songbook
74pp.
Matthew Nickel
Des Hymnagistes Press, 2015
$15

To order please contact deshymnagistes@gmail.com.
Praise for The Leek Soup Songbook

The true poet, like the good gardener, must, as Matthew Nickel writes, “know the names of things.” These poems are alive with them, especially what grows in gardens: garlic, tomatoes, cantaloupes, and of course life-giving, death-defying leeks. And every name has a story, told with wit, intelligence, and often—oh so rare, welcome, and difficult!—humor. Nickel, a careful, reverent, joyful gardener of words, shows us how to “stay attentive to the way things grow.”

—Jane Eblen Keller, writer, author of Adirondack Wilderness: A Story of Man and Nature & numerous other works


The Leek Soup Songbook teaches us how to cherish and celebrate moments of communion. An abundance of sensual particulars create poems that glow, shift and blaze with a passion for being. With a sense of connection to all who have come before, to the land they have tilled, Nickel tries to “relive the death of every living thing.” Each poem of memory is underpinned with tenderness and seeks a grace that approaches the sacramental. The Leek Soup Songbook not only nourishes the body with leeks and garlic, but also feeds the soul by showing how to stay centered, how to rise. Like the taste of a savory soup, music and wisdom in this shimmering collection of poems linger first in the ear but finally find their home in the heart.

—Vivian Shipley, poet, Connecticut State University Distinguished Professor, author of All of Your Messages Have Been Erased, Hardboot, & numerous other works


Matthew Nickel’s Leek Soup Songbook is a splendid first volume of poems from an already much published poet and editor. The best songbooks are composed of songs and stories, cantos and canticles, and Nickel’s superbly crafted collection of cantos and tales of seed-time and harvest, love and loss, tragedy and joy, has something for every reader—autochthon or anachthon, gardener or foodie, lovers of earth or well-made poetry. Leeks have been fabled for millennia as aids to the singing voice and here the poet sings wisely and well of place and displacement, of dépaysement and renewal through relocation. With wit and humor, formal equipoise and reinvested echoes of many writers, the poet gives us authentic songs and recipes, hymns and prayers to reclaim the radical innocence of the soul. Nickel’s suffused sense of place and, more importantly, the way he encounters the Deus Loci, the sublime Spirit of Place, invites us all to sing along with him.

—H. R. Stoneback, poet, scholar, singer-songwriter, Distinguished Professor The State University of New York, author of Voices of Women Singing, The Stoney & Sparrow Songbook & numerous other works
________________________________________
From Matthew Nickel, The Leek Soup Songbook

Exile: False River

     We must live with our own conscience.
                               Ernest Gaines


The lake, bending like God’s fingernail, pretends
to be a river and the live oaks imagine you are
one of them waiting in the limp air for rain fall
and down-thrust vomit of thunder clouds.

I pass an old man under an oak tree, legs extended
his head ridged steady as if time had forgotten to drop
off a package and the world kept waiting, his eyes
followed my truck, waved, then back to his contemplations.

Around the old plantation home and down the dirt lane
I followed the topography of history, observed
thin columns around the mansion, the roof heavy
imposing, and imagined ahead a little boy running

to catch his ball in the lane, his sister stopping
as I approach; no words, just a stare out of some
hollow place in the pit of landscape, a reminder
that we cannot name ourselves until we name the

little girl who stops in the road before us. But I drove
by and paused in front of the last shack of the quarters
the dilapidated memorial for nostalgic scrap book,
the folklorists orgasm, a reminder of the condition

we may call being human; the shack, swallowed
now by earth, like all things in Louisiana, a warning
that we are owned by the land, free to wander
only so far; I drift onward slowly down the road

cut into cane fields on a mud track, then ahead the
grove of pecan and oak; they have already started,
I am late, arrive, shovel in hand, ready to work. Greet
familiar faces, I have been here before, he waves;

“Good to see you again,” and Diane smiles bright;
“When you cut the cane for the kids, Mr. Gaines,
please let me know.” Today I help dig the ditches,
last year washed the stones and painted white,

unearthed the half-submerged slabs under weeds
rescued nameless graves of their ancestors, slaves
who worked this land, lived here, loved, and died,
tried to hear their voices hidden in the dust, then

planted chrysanthemums; today, we divert the
water flooding the cemetery, find ancient nails buried
under the roadway, a tool shaped like a hawk
that I am unable to figure about, but am told

“is just what they used then.” After sweat
and long hot work, one of the guys laughs
“that Ernie, he wrote about me once in a story,
you read him, yeah.” I smiled back, and we

shored up the coulée with large stones,
standing in sun, we laughed at our craftsmanship,
“they done this better then, but is OK now.”
We walked back to Mr. Gaines’ home afterward

followed his golf cart through cane fields,
girls riding along beside him, and soon
the smell of gumbo and red beans and voices
made even the distant river seem true.

“Tell us a story, Ernie” said one of the young
men. Gaines hesitated, drew on his Bud Light,
then looked at me and said, “There was this couple
been married 50 years, sitting on their porch before

cane fields, and the old man says, ‘woman,
you know you going to die before I do, and when you
die, I’m going to write on your tombstone, cold
as always.’ Then the woman, she held still a moment

and stared at that cane a long time before she answered,
‘no, you got that wrong, no me, no you going to die
before I do, and when you do, I’m going to write
on your tombstone, stiff, for the first time.’”

Laughter out of bellies under the port cochere
and I think he might have winked at me, or at least
that’s the way I want to remember it, and the feeling
of never wanting to leave Louisiana, to stay and

come back for La Toussaint to Pointe Coupee Parish
to find answers in the smoke of November, to stay
through the jasmine bloom and spring burst—to lose
myself in the dream of the past; just as bad, perhaps

as the photo of the slave quarters. I have wandered far
from False River down false paths, woven betrayals,
I have met myself in empty gloom of sunset beyond
the gulf’s widening yawn and have wished I could

turn back. Wouldn’t you turn back if you could?
No, my feet have kept wandering. I do not know
where the road goes from here. I do not know if
there is a home somewhere along this road.

Why Athletes Prefer Cheerleaders

Why Athletes Prefer Cheerleaders

H. R. Stoneback

Praise for Why Athletes Prefer Cheerleaders:

"H. R. Stoneback's newest collection, Why Athletes Prefer Cheerleaders, is a singular experience. Every one of these poems epitomizes Pound's old modernist maxim--that poetry should be at least as well written as prose. 

     Drawn together from over fifty years of writing, the book is not only a great gathering of poems about sport; it's a deep sampling of Stoneback's voice. Basketball, baseball, zellball, swimming, diving, walking, fishing, boules--sure, you will find all these sports (and more) invoked. But there's something else going on here too:

            Down the great winds at work over the roofs of the land

            Down the singing maze of the horror of living

            Down the wringing wrists of the honor of living

            Down the winding abyss... ("Fast Break")

     These are poems rapt by the mysteries of courtside chants and yellowing scorecards, the glories of place and travel. From "In Those Same Sad Old Churches in Camden" and "Marrowbone Creek: Sunday Noon" (written in the early 1960s) to the strange twenty-first-century country of Australia, New Zealand, and Tahiti, you will hear one man's voice telling the holy and broken story of what it has meant to live in the body, in place, in time. There is nothing like it."
--Alex Shakespeare, poet and scholar, Skidmore College

"Stoneback’s sport poems are earth poems, land art, tracing the way flesh moves in the world, the way the soul makes a fast break down court, across the map and over the abyss into moments of grace and glory."
 --Matthew Nickel, poet and scholar, author of Hemingway’s Dark Night, Misericordia University 

If you are interested in ordering a copy a Why Athletes Prefer Cheerleaders, please contact deshymnagistes@gmail.com. 

Voices from Venice

Voices from Venice

H. R. Stoneback

New from Des Hymnagistes Press:

Signed limited edition of poems by H. R. Stoneback, bilingual edition, with facing page translations by six Italian writers and translators (Rosella Mamoli Zorzi, A. DeMarchi, Elisabetta Mezzani, Virginia Pignagnoli, Sofia Ricotilli, and C. Tinnelli). To inquire regarding limited availability, please email Des Hymnagistes Press at deshymnagistes@gmail.com.

Save the P.O.etry

Save the P.O.etry—

A National Crusade to save the Post Office through poetry. As everyone knows from recent headlines in the news, the Post Office is in serious trouble, and many Post Offices are threatened with closure or radical cutbacks in hours and service. The Post Office has long been a center of the sense of place and community in American towns and villages. One of the primary factors in the current Post Office crisis is identified as the drastic decline in the use of First Class Mail due to the overwhelming use of e-mail.

         What you can do to help save the P.O.—1) send at least ten people a copy of a poem through the real mail, using actual stamps purchased at an actual Post Office; 2) ask at least ten people to snail-mail a poem to at least ten other people. Act now to save the P.O.—do the math: if you send 10 copies of your favorite poem (or maybe one you’ve written to help save the P.O.) and all the people you send the poem to also do the same, the numbers spiral, and soon through many individual purchases of less than $5 worth of stamps, millions of dollars will pour into the P.O. treasury.

“Poetry makes nothing happen.”—W. H. Auden

          But another poet has written:

“Poetry can make things happen.”—H. R. Stoneback

          We encourage teachers at all levels to invite the participation of their students in this campaign. Post this announcement in libraries. Visit a Post Office, buy some stamps, and mail a poem and a copy of this information sheet to 10 (or 50!) people.

          This nationwide crusade to save the Post Office through mailing poems is based in New Paltz, New York. The campaign will receive national attention at the American Literature Association Conference in New Orleans in October 2012 and at the SAMLA Convention in Durham, NC in November 2012.

          If you would like to report on your role in the SAVE the P.O.etry Crusade, you may e-mail us at: deshymnagistes@gmail.com or visit us at deshymnagistes.blogspot.com

Stoneback (and other hymnagistes) in Paris

THE SWAN BAR—POETRY READING
165 boulevard du Montparnasse
Paris 6e

H. R. Stoneback, author (or editor) of 30 books, will read from his recent volumes  VOICES OF WOMEN SINGING and HEMINGWAY'S PARIS: OUR PARIS? at the Swan Bar on Thursday June 7, 2012 @ 9:30 pm. The event begins with readings by the opening poets Jessica Conti and Matthew Nickel before the featured performance—Stoneback will read from 10:00-11:00.

Kentucky: Poets of Place

Kentucky: Poets of Place, a new anthology published by The Elizabeth Madox Roberts Society, edited by Matthew Nickel, and including poems by famous Kentucky writers like Wendell Berry, Elizabeth Madox Roberts, Robert Penn Warren, H. R. Stoneback, and others (Dave Smith, Matthew Haughton, Ricardo Nazario y Colon, Ron Smith, Vivian Shipley, Jessica Conti, Gregg Neikirk, Shawn Rubenfeld, Chris Paolini, Chris Lawrence, Matthew Nickel, etc.), will be premiered during Kentucky Writers Day at Penn's Store in Gravel Switch, KY, Sunday April 22, between 3-4 pm. 

 If you would like to purchase Kentucky: Poets of Place, please send an email to deshymnagistes@gmail.com.

From Codhill Press, H. R. Stoneback's VOICES OF WOMEN SINGING

Des Hymnagistes poet H. R. Stoneback has recently published VOICES OF WOMEN SINGING (Codhill Press). Please visit their website for more information or to order, please visit Amazon.com.

Praise for VOICES OF WOMEN SINGING:

--"VOICES OF WOMEN SINGING is a funny, tragic, wonderful book . . . Stoneback writes always with good humor and great passion--about Paris, about love, about grief and joy, about the gains and losses of more than half a century gone."
Alex Andriesse Shakespeare, writer, Boston College

--"A virtuosic synthesis of disparate forms and haunting formulations, VOICES OF WOMEN SINGING is 'life-writing' of a wholly new and overwhelming kind, 'written' in the fullest sense and born of a life lived with passionate intensity."
William Bedford Clark, poet-critic, Texas A&M University

--"H. R. Stoneback's VOICES OF WOMEN SINGING . . . [is] an epic account of roots and sources, and it's close to the bone, intimate beyond words, stirring. Love is at the center of this book: romantic love, love of music, and love as a driving (and saving) force."
William Boyle, writer, University of Mississippi

--"There are only a few voices I can listen to and feel the way I ought to feel in church. H. R. Stoneback's VOICES OF WOMEN SINGING captures some of those voices . . . These are sacred songs; these are eternal poems. Listen slowly with infinite love and compassion."
Matthew Nickel, poet-editor, University of Louisiana

And, from the back cover of VOICES, among a host of laudatory comments from leading writers about Stoneback's recent volumes of poetry, a few excerpts:

--"[Stoneback's CAFE MILLENNIUM] performs an act of verbal hypnosis on its reader."
Billy Collins, Poet Laureate

--"These poems [SINGING THE SPRINGS] spring and sing right out of the earth . . .I hug these songs to my heart."
Catherine Aldington, French poet-translator, Imagist

--"The poem [HOMAGE: A LETTER TO ROBERT PENN WARREN] is a delight, a great read, a rumble of energy all the way through . . . the rhythmic roll and strut."

Dave Smith, poet, editor THE SOUTHERN REVIEW, Coleman Professor of Poetry, Johns Hopkins

--"What I love about Stoneback's poetry is that it makes you love poetry . . . He's a bard, celebratory and rhythmical, with an unmistakable voice and he gets and begets the numinous nature of poiesis."
Allen Josephs, writer, University of West Florida

--[Stoneback is a] Postmodern modernist extraordinaire!"
John R. O. Gery, poet, Director Ezra Pound Center for Literature

[On HEMINGWAY"S PARIS: OUR PARIS?]

--"Stoneback's lyrical prose takes the reader inside the soul of Hemingway's Paris to reveal tantalizing secrets."
A.E. Hotchner, writer, Hemingway colleague, author of the classic PAPA HEMINGWAY

--"Stoneback's evocation of Hemingway's Paris is as close as I have come to reliving those Paris days in the company of Ernest Hemingway."
Valerie Hemingway, writer

From Penn's Store to the World

From Penn’s Store to the World: An Anthology of Poems

98 pp.
Edited by H. R. Stoneback
with Amanda Boyle and Brad McDuffie
Des Hymnagistes Press 2011
$20

In the spring of 2010 a great flood inundated Penn’s Store, which is located near Gravel Switch, Kentucky. The old country store is situated at the edge of the tobacco and corn bottomlands, and to the uninformed eye of the casual passerby the store might appear to be just another ramshackle structure in a dying agrarian community. But this store is a historic landmark, said to be America’s oldest country store run by the same family—since at least the 1840s. The Penn family that still runs the store is related to the great Kentucky writer, Robert Penn Warren. It has since become a place for poetry and song gatherings, and for over a decade the location of the annual Kentucky Writers Day celebration every April. This is an important landmark of Song and Story, Ballad and Poetry, in a numinous place redolent with a sense of the past.

Because of the flood, H. R. Stoneback organized a Benefit in November 2010 to raise money to help the damaged store. A direct result of the Benefit was the publication of a substantial volume entitled From Penn’s Store to the World: An Anthology of Poems. All funds raised by the benefit went directly to Penn’s Store as a gift. (And any profits made by the book will also go to benefit the Store.) This book contains 50 poems—some written by well-known poets of national reputation, some by previously unknown poets who wanted to help the cause. And the poets are not just from Kentucky, but from numerous states and countries. It is the hope of all poets who participated that Penn’s Store will survive.

W. H. Auden was not the first or the last to say that poetry makes nothing happen. We beg to differ: poetry can make things happen, especially when words are anchored in the spirit of human community and deeds of concrete compassion. In this crusade to save Penn’s Store words were deeds, poems were cash.

If you would like to purchase a copy of From Penn’s Store to the World: An Anthology of Poems and help Penn’s Store, please write to Des Hymnagistes at deshymnagistes@gmail.com for ordering information.

Review of McDuffie's book

A very favorable review of Brad McDuffie's And The West Was Not So Far Away has been published by fellow hymnagistes Alex Andriesse Shakespeare at Rattle. Please read the review here

Anyone interested in purchasing McDuffie's book of poems (or any other book by Des Hymnagistes Press) should contact deshymnagistes@gmail.com.

New Books Available from Des Hymnagistes Press

See Press Release below re: release of new volume of poetry Des Hymnagistes: An Anthology. This book had its American debut at the Kentucky Writers Day celebration in late April; the world premiere will take place at Brunnenburg Castle in Italy in June, with readings by many of the poets included in the volume (e.g., descendants of the original Imagists; the new book, of course, resonates with the landmark 1914 volume of Imagist poetry--Des Imagistes: An Anthology.)

1) Des Hymnagistes: An Anthology
Edited by Matthew Nickel & H. R. Stoneback

Paperback (108 pages): $20 includes S&H
Hardback (108 pages): $40 includes S&H


2) Matthew Nickel, ed. Knowledge Carried to the Heart: A Festschrift for H. R. Stoneback (softbound 60 pages)--$15 (plus $2 shipping)

If you would like to order Knowledge Carried to the Heart, please mail Matthew Nickel at deshymnagistes@gmail.com


3) H. R. Stoneback, Fitzgerald Variations (poems; softbound 41 pages)--$12 (plus $2 shipping). To purchase Fitzgerald Variations please make check payable to H. R. Stoneback, indicate how many you would like, and send to:






If you are interested in purchasing books, please write Des Hymnagistes Press at deshymnagistes@gmail.com for ordering information.

American Premiere of Des Hymnagistes: An Anthology

The 2010 Kentucky Writers Day Celebration at Historic Penn's Store will feature the American Premiere of the new poetry volume Des Hymnagistes: An Anthology (Des Hymnagistes Press, 2010). The book will have its World Premiere and formal release celebration in June at Brunnenburg Castle in Italy, former home of Ezra Pound and now the residence of his daughter Mary de Rachewiltz. The Des Hymnagistes volume resonates with Pound's landmark Des Imagistes: An Anthology (1914). Inspired by Imagism, filtered through a century of literary history and transformed by influences such as hymns and country songs, Hymnagism is a worldwide movement with deep Kentucky roots--over the past decade, for example, many Hymnagistes poets have read their works at Kentucky Writers Day Celebrations. This new volume includes poems by descendants of the original Imagists (e.g. Pound's daughter Mary de Rachewiltz and Richard Aldington's daughter Catherine Aldington),Valerie Hemingway, as well as the work of the well-known Kentucky poet H. R. Stoneback and other rising young Hymnagiste poets. Along with Stoneback, several other contributors to the volume--A.B., William Boyle, Brad McDuffie, Matthew Nickel, Alex Shakespeare--will read at the 2010 Kentucky Writers Day, Sunday, April 25th at 2 PM, at Penn's Store. All of these Hymnagiste poets will be in Kentucky for their annual pilgrimage to the Elizabeth Madox Roberts Conference at St. Catharine College in Springfield (April 24-26). And they claim Roberts, Kentucky's great novelist, as an Imagiste, a proto-Hymnagiste.

The American Premiere and Hymnagiste Readings are scheduled for 2:00pm until 3:30pm, April 25 during the 2010 KENTUCKY WRITERS DAY CELEBRATIONS at Historic Penn's Store. Penn's Store is located at 257 Penn's Store Road, off KY HWY 243 3 miles SE of Gravel Switch, Kentucky.


From the Kentucky Literary Newsletter and Kentucky Writers Day Press release, April 1, 2010.

Coming Soon!

Des Hymnagistes Press is hard at work on a new Anthology to be available soon. Please check back for updates in the coming weeks. We still have available copies for sale of Brad McDuffie's And the West Was Not So Far Away, H. R. Stoneback's Amazing-Grace-Wheel-Chair-Jumpshot-Jesus-Love-Poems, and the anthology edited by Matthew Nickel, Illumination & Praise: Poems for Elizabeth Madox Roberts and Kentucky. Please contact Des Hymnagistes Press at deshymnagistes@gmail.com for questions and more information.

And The West Was Not So Far Away

Now Available From Des Hymnagistes Press

And The West Was Not So Far Away
Brad McDuffie

Des Hymnagistes Press
ISBN 978-0-9822693-2-9
$12 (plus $2 S&H)

To order please make check payable to "Brad McDuffie":
$12 (plus $2 S&H) and mail to:

Brad McDuffie
Nyack College
1 South Blvd
Nyack, NY 10960


from McDuffie's "A Meditation on my First Tour de France"

Our tour ends down the Rue Saint-Jacques.
We spend l’heure verte at the Dome,
and watch feux d’artifice over the Seine;
as the moon rises over Notre-Dame,
we raise our glasses to Lance.
On the last night we dine at L’Écurie
the owner brings us absinthe
he apologizes for the wait, welcomes
our platoon like the brothers he lost at Reims.
He raises his glass, looks you in the eye, salutes.

You’ve carried me into high country,
and I’ve fixed my eyes on the road ahead,
where the light steadies beyond the Panthéon,
seeing the place where everything begins.


Praise for McDuffie's And The West Was Not So Far Away:

Brad McDuffie's poems come from the source of all that is good. I haven't been moved by a book of poems in this way since Erin Rourke's Three Bullets and a Magic Bean. Eat these poems. Drink them. Live off of them for years in the wilderness. They are about moments of grace, moments of doubt, and--above all--moments of intense communion. Teach these poems to students! Bring them to courthouses! Pay parking tickets with these poems! Defy your elders, using only these poems as evidence of your right to do what you want! Write letters to your leaders and quote McDuffie! Believe me, children: poetry's gone to the shithouse. You want to help? You want to make a contribution? Buy McDuffie's book, and don't look back.

--Francis Eamon Boyle, author of Raised Hearts Hailing

McDuffie's poems are beautiful, straight, and true. I read so much poetry where the emotion--the real emotion--has been wrung out, but McDuffie knows how to keep it in and use it to its full potential. His poems work the middle ground between Townes Van Zandt and Robert Lowell, Jason Molina and Donald Junkins, Bob Dylan and H. R. Stoneback. At the beginning of one section, McDuffie quotes John Darnielle of The Mountain Goats: "But we are not as far west as you suppose we are," fully realizing the idea of the west that threads its way through these pages. Interestingly enough, The Mountain Goats have a new album out simultaneously with McDuffie's book. In "Ezekiel 7 and the Permanent Efficacy of Grace," Darnielle sings: "When I emerge I find my car like a cathedral in a dream of the future." This line gets at the overall feeling of McDuffie's book: Reading it, you feel like you're inside of something big, a cathedral maybe, a place where prayer and miracles still matter.

--William Boyle, University of Mississippi

Happy Birthday

Sparrow.

Amazing-Grace-Wheelchair-Jumpshot-Jesus-Love-Poems

Now available from Des Hymnagistes Press:

Amazing-Grace-Wheelchair-Jumpshot-Jesus-Love-PoemsH. R. Stoneback
172 pp.
Des Hymnagistes Press
ISBN 978-0-9822693-0-5
$20 (plus $2 S&H)

To order, please email deshymnagistes@gmail.com.
"Postmodern modernist extraordinaire!"
--John R. O. Gery, Director Ezra Pound Center for Literature (Davenport's Version, American Ghost/Americki Duh and numerous other books)

What I love about Stoneback's poetry is that it makes you love poetry. It is often very accomplished poetry, but Stoney's double gift for narrative and clarity encourage you to read it with the relish and abandon you would bring to finely honed prose. At the same time he knows--as Alfred Kazin said to me one afternoon, walking the miracle sands of Pensacola Beach--that all great poetry is atavistic. Stoney's atavisms--from the chthonic to the ludic, from the tellurian to the celestial--mourn for all that's missing in the vast charnel house of modern culture. He's a bard, celebratory and rhythmical, with an unmistakable voice and he gets and begets the numinous nature of poiesis.
--Allen Josephs, University of West Florida,White Wall of Spain: The Mysteries of Andalusian Culture, Ritual and Sacrifice in the Corrida: The Saga of Cesar Rincon, and numerous other books.


H.R. Stoneback's superb new collection of poems speaks to such vital fundamentals as love, hope, loss, redemption and renewal as these things are transfigured through Faith. In these eloquent and deeply personal pieces, Stoneback works with the precision of a virtuoso craftsman to devise new songs with which to speak ancient truths, fomenting a radical new rubric of vision and speech while at the same time retaining the best of oral and written tradition in the English language. Stoneback's landscapes and rivers and people are sacred. So are his words about them.
--Edward J. Renehan Jr., musician, writer (John Burroughs: An American Naturalist, The Kennedy's at War: 1937-1945, Dark Genius of Wallstreet: The Misunderstood Life of Jay Gould, King of the Robber Barons, Commodore: The Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt, and numerous other books)


H. R. Stoneback's new collection contributes another memorable chapter of story and verse to his earlier works, Cafe Millennium & Other Poems and Singing the Springs. These hymnagiste poems rollick between celebratory song and heartbreaking elegy, between the wild weirdness of the 1960s and the weirder wildness of this new century—and perhaps one of the rarest qualities in contemporary poetry, they are capable of communicating a sense of authentic joy.
In Stoneback's hands, autobiography becomes something universal; the work of mourning is shared, and sweetness is confided. Perhaps the most striking piece in a striking collection is the "found poem" Ua mau ke ea o ka aina i ka pono, which the poet wrote in Nashville, 1965 about:
how we lived in Hawai'i when we
were twenty-five how we got there what we
did there and how we came the long road home
never much money but always with song
luck and hope and hunger when we were young
After reading this poem, after reading all the poems of Amazing-Grace, we too have traveled with the poet on a long road home. And it is a marvelous ride.
--Alex Andriesse Shakespeare, Boston College


H.R. Stoneback's Amazing-Grace-Wheelchair-Jumpshot-Jesus-Love-Poems contains new (and old) poems that are about victory and precision, overcoming and redemption, love and lonesomeness, family and faith. These poems often draw from hymns, carrying the reader to the good places Stoneback has known. Above all, though, Stoneback instructs, teaching us how to live well and truly in the world.
--William Boyle, University of Mississippi


These poems have an immediacy to them, what Fitzgerald called "romantic readiness," they defy the static claustrophobia of academic poems, they are alive, they breathe with place and history, and they impart these journeys to the reader, the pilgrim. These are lasting poems, they endure, they teach, they carry the reader along traces both common and transcendent, blurring the lines of demarcation because they live the values. As Stoneback writes in "Travel Rites and Writing":
The spirit of place does not drink with tourists . . .
You have to live there,
and once you have, you do not want to write about it,
for all such writing is betrayal, unless it is poetry or fiction.
And we all know how dangerous those countries are.
--Brad McDuffie, Nyack College


Stoneback's new book of poems is a hymnagiste narrative tour de force, moving the reader into a tight complicity of darkness and light, wheeling in amazing grace toward "the still point of the turning world." In "Hear That Train: Elegy Written in a Country Music Churchyard (For Johnny Cash)" and "Victory in Jesus: Meditations on an Old Hymn" Stoneback leads us down that old road of sin, illuminating moments that bind our souls in salvation through old hymns and country songs. In his epic "Hawai'i 1965" sequence and in poems for Sparrow, the reader learns how deep love and song are often the only ways of survival in life's darkest hours. And in the final section "Walking (with Pipes & Drum)," through the exactitude of line and form, after a long uphill wheelchair ramp, Stoneback carries us into the refining fires of renewed hope and faith. Through these poems and their voices, poems and songs that read and sing like prayers, we learn how to live each day
in charity with small things, and how to find our way back after each dark night to that old redemption story.
--Matthew Nickel, University of Louisiana—Lafayette


Recent Response from Hawaii:
H. R. Stoneback is a really down to earth man. He is a down to earth man with a bohemian spirit. I told him I was from Florida. He thought I was a Polynesian because of the lei I was wearing. I got him to autograph my program book and to a photo with him. I wanted to purchase his book of poems titled “Amazing grace wheelchair jump start Jesus poems”. He was a singer in his beatnik days in Waikiki when the locals called it the jungle. He was a great speaker.
--Hugeaux, Artist/Photographer (www.hugeaux.com)




***And now available from Codhill Press, H. R. Stoneback's Hurricane Hymn & Other Poems (www.codhill.com)

Des Hymnagistes in New Orleans

The Maple Leaf Poetry Reading Series

(oldest poetry reading series in the South)

Presents Featured Reader

H. R. Stoneback

author of Hurricane Hymn & Other Poems,
Amazing-Grace-Wheelchair-Jumpshot-Jesus-Love-Poems
and numerous other volumes

Opening readers
William Boyle & Matthew Nickel

Introduction of H. R. Stoneback by William Boyle and Matthew Nickel

SUNDAY
January 18, 2009
3 - 5 pm

The Maple Leaf Bar
***8316 Oak Street***
New Orleans
504-866-9359

Florida English and other updates

Florida English has recently published a special Imagist Issue now available on their website. Much in this volume was presented at the First Imagist Conference held in Brunnenburg Castle, Dorf Tirol, 2007. Several Hymnagistes presented on the imagist poets, and several poems by hymnagistes are included within this great volume.

There have also been recent reports of Hymnagistes in the north country around Lake Placid and throughout the Adirondacks. It seems they have already taken the Olympic Ski Jump, the Bob-Sled Run, and all of SUNY Plattsburg.

New reports coming in daily claim that there will be Hymnagistes at this year's SAMLA conference in Louisville, KY. If you're in town, stop by November 7-9, 2008 (see SAMLA Convetion Website for more information). I hear Des Hymnagistes are taking over the conference and there will be several poetry readings, presentations, and the normal festivities.

September 25, 2008

Happy Birthday Sparrow