Gayle Elen Harvey

Gayle Harvey has published widely in journals such as Hanging Loose, Poetry Northwest, Yankee, Yellow Silk, Visions International, Gulf Coast, Willow Springs and Atlanta Review. Awards include New York Foundation for the Arts fellowship, 1st prize Columbia University Journal of Lit. & Art, Frances Locke Memorial Award/The Bitter Oleander, 2002 Hannah Kahn Foundation Award/Gulfstream, co-winner Emily Dickinson Award/Poetry Society of America and the Dorothy Damon Award/Comstock Review.

Scheduled, Unscheduled Appointments
Poems by Gayle Elen Harvey
2003, ISBN: 0974070114, $7.95

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“I take much pleasure from this exemplary writing and maybe I will take instructions, too, because for the first time in a very long while, I'm feeling the stirrings of language in my own mind. Thank you for showing me what can be done."
- - Hayden Carruth

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Today's poetry deals with a shared world's grief, with its admiration for quick heroes and a love for all things and causes that surround us in a sensual vertigo. We read this poetry, we hear it read, and some of us even choose to write it. Those who do, commonize our language, believe they're communicating and making themselves feel less alone as human beings, if not poets. Gayle Elen Harvey doesn't care about being comforted by the agreement of others as she continues to stay and probe within herself, measuring each of her poems as though it were a recipe for her very own survival. Her language does not just try and describe her interior world, it is her interior world from which she's managed to speak a range of emotions many of us might never have the chance of experiencing otherwise. As in this last stanza to Second Snow, a poem written in memory of her late brother, John Edward:

Un-held from the sky, another sun disappears
from those terrible heights, leaves the scaffolding empty.
Demons are packed off
in small crates. The moment of knowing is cousin to
lanterns, light calling
"come home---"

As we all know, it's not such an easy world for us to live. Any kind hand we extend can sometimes make a greater difference than we may ever recognize. Reaching out in her poems to what's missing in others' lives, while sharing her immense depth of understanding with us, is exactly why Harvey's words reach each of them with some relief. This not only brings back all that is decent and gentle about poetry, but shows each of us the very kind of life it takes to write it.

--Paul B. Roth, editor & publisher, The Bitter Oleander Press