Harry Humes’s first collection of poetry, Winter Weeds, won the 1983 Devins Award from the University of Missouri Press. Ridge Music was an Associated Writing Programs Contest finalist. In 1993 he won the Eighth Annual World’s Greatest Short Short Story Competition for “The Cough.” Humes, born in Girardville, Pennsylvania, in 1935, is the recipient of the Theodore Roethke Poetry Award and a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. He teaches English at Kutztown University and lives in Lenhartsville, Pennsylvania.
The Bottomland
$19.95
Poems by Harry Humes
5.5 x 8.5, 72 pages
978-1-55728-380-1 (paper)
July 1995
“Harry Humes writes about forces within and beyond familiar, everyday things, forces which are unnameable except as one attends the very items which hide them. He uncovers as well a quiet humor in his world of coal miners, rare animals, their context of secret losses, the world of mink and sunflowers and the sensuous drift of time. From his deceptively simple Saxon diction he leads us into primary, unsettling complexity; he has learned to lift from his directness a fetching music, too. This is an unpretentiously probing, integral book ‘filled with spectacle and wilderness’ and ‘a few last things before it’s time to leave.’ ”
—Dabney Stuart
“In language that is like a cool splash of springwater, Humes re-creates a life lived close to, and sometimes in bitter contention with, nature. The Appalachia of these poems is pure, unsentimentalized, beautiful, demanding, and giving. And so are the poems.”
—Kelly Cherry
