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The Night Marsh, Poems by Penny Harter

The Night Marsh is Penny Harter’s journey into knowledge, digging into the earth, into the past, seeking and turning up connections and wisdom:

She carries resurrection in her hands,
her fingers splayed to sift the earth,
searching for some fragment of a skull
that answers to her name.

Delving deep beneath the surface of things, Harter’s graceful poems bring many unexpected gifts to the reader.

Sample Poems by Penny Harter

“The Night Marsh is a beautiful collection, rich and deep, by a poet able to communicate truths that almost go beyond words. Several of the poems convey astonishing spiritual experiences (see ‘Voices,’ ‘Diffusion,’ ‘Translating the Sky on the Morning of My Birthday,’ ‘One Moonless Night,’ and more). In other poems, Penny Harter intimately confronts the natural world; and often, high moments of her life, and our lives, between death and childhood, are memorably held fast.”—X. J. Kennedy

“In The Night Marsh, Penny Harter very effectively dissolves the illusory walls we humans have constructed between ourselves and the rest of nature. That is the sort of healing people need. May her audience be huge.”—Christopher Herold, founder and editor emeritus of The Heron’s Nest; author of A Path in the Garden

"Fusing the metaphysical and the elemental, Penny Harter's direct, lyrical, light-filled poems praise—and question— the very turnings of the earth. In these rich meditations, Harter celebrates and makes radiantly new the world's beauties, even as she invites us to 'find, beyond the flesh, / a brilliance left behind.'"— Catherine Doty, author of Momentum

"Penny Harter’s poems take on the shadow-side of life, the things we flee from— night, pain, aging, death, dementia—and draw them into the light, finding the beauty in wrinkles, loneliness, and the stiff body of a beloved cat. Her poems pick up and examine life and its transitions just the way her child-hands once picked up the fossilized 'ghosts' of ferns long ago turned to rock, reminding us that the wheel of existence rolls onward, and we with it, no matter what comes. Treasure this book, as Harter treasures life."— Susan Tweit, naturalist, and author of The San Luis Valley: Sand Dunes and Sandhill Cranes

Poet and fiction writer Penny Harter has presented readings, talks, and workshops from coast-to-coast at venues such as the Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festivals, the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, the Border Book Festivals, Haiku North America Conferences, and others. She has also led workshops and participated in collaborative writing with other poets several times in Japan. Harter’s poems and short stories have appeared in many periodicals, including Ark River Review, Blueline, Earth’s Daughters, Exit 13, The Edison Literary Review, Ekphrasis, 5 A.M., Gargoyle, Journal of New Jersey Poets, The Kerf, The Ledge, Lips, Madrona, and elsewhere. Translations of her poems have been published in Colombia, Croatia, France, Holland, Japan, Korea, and Romania. Widely published in anthologies as well, she has received three fellowships in poetry from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts, the Mary Carolyn Davies Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America, and the first William O. Douglas Nature Writing Award for her work in American Nature Writing 2002. Her long autobiographical essay appears in Contemporary Authors Autobiography Series (1998) and is reprinted in Contemporary Authors (1999).

ISBN 978-1933456973, 104 pages

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