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