Praise for Loyalty: New & Selected Poems
“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.… The work is very rich and diverse, although [he] keeps to his style faithfully.… [His] style is there, very solid—and bless it!… Wonderfully concise bringing together of wonder, closeness and immense distances!”
“I love the sweet clarity of [his] lines, their poise, their exact just-enoughness.… And here’s blessings for [his] political poems, the Whitmanesque celebration of ‘Shock and Awe,’ the best response to atrocity, yes, is to celebrate life in the face of it—, and that memorable line, which is the clearest definition of our difference as a species: ‘the only animal that runs towards fire.’”
“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!… What did Thoreau say about the cost of any great work, that it cost a lifetime? It’s an extraordinary lifetime that we feel in this book.… What tremendous tact [his] poems all show, never a word too much, nothing insisted on, a light touch that looks easy, but, I think, takes tremendous art to achieve.”
“A handsome, comprehensive, moving book.”
“[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.”
“An accumulation of resonances…delicious lineation…how many of these poems are ars poeticae. Or how many slip through a brilliantly quiet image, from the outer world to the inner.… Profound thanks to [this] mercurial poet who conjured ‘unimagined joy’ in this ‘unprepossessing wilderness.’”
About the Author
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.
