Praise for Henry Braun's Loyalty: New and Selected Poems
2008 Maine Literary Awards Winner for Poetry
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“The poems are strong, impressive, learned without needing to be scholarly; loving and often surprising in the way they pull a conclusion out of darkness. . . . The work is very rich and diverse, although [he] keeps to his style faithfully. . . . [His] style is there, very solid—and bless it! . . . Wonderfully concise bringing together of wonder, closeness and immense distances!”
—Nathaniel Tarn
"I love the sweet clarity of [his] lines, their poise, their exact just-enoughness. . . . And here’s blessings for [his] political poems, the Whitmanesque celebration of “Shock and Awe”, the best response to atrocity, yes, is to celebrate life in the face of it—, and that memorable line, which is the clearest definition of our difference as a species: “the only animal that runs towards fire.”
—Eleanor Wilner
"Poetry too good to be gulped, it is to be relished, to be read slowly and many times. I am so happy to own this beautiful collection! . . . What did Thoreau say about the cost of any great work, that it cost a lifetime? It’s an extraordinary lifetime that we feel in this book. . . . What tremendous tact [his] poems all show, never a word too much, nothing insisted on, a light touch that looks easy, but, I think, takes tremendous art to achieve.”
—Kate Barnes, former Maine Poet Laureate
“A handsome, comprehensive, moving book.”
—Toby Olson
“[Braun's] sensibility is a remarkable alert one. I find myself reading poems again and again as they keep coming to life in new ways.”
—Baron Wormser, former Maine Poet Laureate
“An accumulation of resonances…delicious lineation…how many of these poems are ars poeticae. Or how many slip through a brilliantly quiet image, from the outer world to the inner. . . . Profound thanks to [this] mercurial poet who conjured “unimagined joy” in this “unprepossessing wilderness.”
—Marion Stocking
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Loyalty
Each morning the shining
ball lifts over the ridge
to warm my Subaru
where I dwell, where I live it up,
in the between while
learning how
not to hurt the way
falling leaves surround
a wholeness of life,
not to see
fringes of the ocean
other than fresh and old,
not to sift the grains
of wheat and sand we are given
and given
overly carelessly.
My smile
is too much backed by consciousness
for me ever to die.
So much for gravity!
hums the hummingbird
eyeing my eye.
It's time
to adjust my hover-buckle
to the task,
faithfully to repair
our Hubble
with all the other bees at work
on the starflower.
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