Henry Braun
“[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.””
Henry Braun (1930–2014) was born in Olean, New York and grew up in Buffalo. After graduating from Brandeis University, where he studied with Claude Vigee and J.V. Cunningham, he spent a year in France on a Fulbright, and then went to Boston University, where he participated in Robert Lowell's workshop. In the 1960s he organized poetry read-ins against the war in Vietnam and was convicted in a Federal court of tax evasion. His war tax dollars were donated to a veterans hospital and to public schools in Philadelphia. As an organizer of a draft card turn-in at the Justice Department he was an unindicted co-conspirator at the Boston 5 trial.
Most of his career as a teacher of literature and creative writing was at Temple University, including a year at Temple’s branch campus in Japan. He has served as coordinator and host of the Poetry Center of the YM-YWHA in Philadelphia. In 1968 his first book of poems, The Vergil Woods, was published by Atheneum. His work has appeared in many magazines, including Poetry, The Nation, The Massachusetts Review, American Poetry Review, Prairie Schooner, and The Colorado Review, and in several anthologies. Loyalty: New and Selected Poems was the first offering of Off the Grid Press.
“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.””
“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!”
Loyalty
Poems by Henry Braun
Henry Braun’s final collection is a vibrant tribute to a life of quietude, simple beauties, and convictions that cut to the bone. All of which become poetry in Braun’s masterful hands.
winner of the 2008
Maine Award for Poetry
