Poetry

Poetry by Mark Hart

                                                     
I'm excited to announce that my new book of poetry, The Joy of Blasphemy, is now available, and I want to invite those of you who are local to the book launch event on Thursday, March 29, 7 PM at the Jones Library in Amherst. Just as my first book, Boy Singing to Cattle, was loosely organized around my relationship with my father growing up on a farm and my subsequent relationship to farming through a lifetime, so The Joy of Blasphemy is loosely organized around the experience of growing up Catholic and its impact on how I see religion and the sacred. The poetry gives a none-too-pious, earth-centered, farm-eye view of spirituality that I hope will amuse, inspire, invoke feeling, and move you to ponder more deeply the experience of being the human animal we are. You can get a copy from me, in Collective Copies in Amherst, or online at Leveler's Presshttp://levellerspress.com/store/commerce.cgi?preadd=action&key=1322 (Available through Amazon--but buy it locally if you can please or else I make only 10% of what I'd get through the press.)

Read two poems from this book  - Our Lady of Acid Rain, The Barn
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Mark Hart's book, Boy Singing to Cattle," winner of the Poetry Prize, was a finalist for the 2014 Massachusetts Book Award. In the words of judge, Andrea Carter Brown, ''at once a moving elegy for a lost parent, a portrait of a way of life, and of the landscape and community tied to it, and a reconciliation with that past.'' From the wheat fields of his boyhood in the Pacific Northwest to the woods of rural New England, Hart takes us on a spiritual journey across the land, showing what it means to be a man in the brief moment of earthly existence we are afforded in life. However fleeting and impermanent the marks men have made on the land and the people around them, they remain indelible in Hart's memory, and are given lasting permanence in Boy Singing to Cattle, his first book of poetry.
You can buy a signed copy from the author by sending $15 plus $2.50 postage to Mark's address on the contacts page.  Or you can order it through the publisher, Pearl Editions or Amazon. 




Burying My Father

Hobos

Grace

Torching the Playhouse

Planting Garlic

Mercy

Holy Communion

Real Drinkers

The Calf in the Pantry