Penelope’s Design: Fourteen Poems

The memories of "a dream-disheveled child" in the Deep South unfold into the meditative travels of the literary man in these elegant, assured poems, riddled with starlight, richly enlivened with deep-dyed images of nature and art, and a meticulous ear for echoes both allusive and actual, in a language as sensual as it is referential. As his Odysseus says in the beautifully orchestrated "The Poem of the Oar," "I snaked from the epic plot / as wisdom from its skin."---Eleanor Wilner, author of Reversing the Spell: New and Selected Poems and The Girl with Bees in Her Hair

Havird has inherited the lyric tradition in English with uncommon subtlety and intelligence of feeling. His poems blend melody and prosaic, truthful modesty, creating "that hum which tunes the orchestra of stars / to its off key." One feels a tempered soul, part rueful, part wry, taking its bearings in poems of elliptical landscape and great elegance: "Sometimes the footpath became a hollow-way. . ." Penelope's Design is a book that repays deep and sustained attention.---Rosanna Warren, author of Departure: Poems and Fables of the Self: Studies in Lyric Poetry