Gayle Elen Harvey

Eating barracuda for lunch and taming Catskill rattlesnakes has prepared Harvey
for the life as a poet. Since 1976, poetry’s been ___”not art, but breathing-----“
with publications including Phoebe, Hanging Loose, New York Quarterly,
Visions International, Atlanta Review and Poetry Northwest.  Awards include an NYFA
fellowship, Emily Dickinson Award (PSA), 1st prizes with Columbia University Journal of Lit. & Art, Ekphrasis Poetry Competition, The Frances Locke Memorial Award/
Bitter Oleander Press and 1st prize Sow’s Ear Chapbook Competition. Gayle’s
published 7 poetry collections, the finale 3 with Sow’s Ear, Spire Press and Pudding
House Press. Her latest reading was at Bright Hill Center, Treadwell, NY.

We are pleased to announce inSPIREd Poetry Series featuring Among the Fierce Eves by Gayle Elen Harvey!

Order the first seven (7) selections in the inSPIREd Poetry Series + a bonus notebook for only $45.

inSPIREd Poetry Series

OR

Order Among the Fierce Eves only for $8*.

Among the Fierce Eves by Gayle Elen Harvey

*As always, there are no shipping charges if you order
directly from Spire Press.

Other Spire Books by Gayle Elen Harvey:

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

Free shipping on all Spire books!

“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