Field Guide A Tempo (The Hobblebush Granite State Poetry Series, 9)

A freewheeling debut collection, finalist for the 2016 Kate Tufts Discovery Award

New Hampshire poet Henry Walters introduces a lyric voice of considerable range. Saws sing, mill-wheels wail, milk bottles play the blues against ancient, Medieval, and modern backdrops, all bound together by an ear tuned to "barbarian syllables." A series of linked triptychs assemble an irregular archive of rhythms gleaned from childhood games, dance steps, rainfall, Greek myth, and a range of lyric predecessors (including translations from Propertius, Rimbaud, and Montale), a sort of intertidal wrack-zone between art's careful arrangements and the inscrutable patterns of the natural world. Walters makes use of prose, blank-verse, sonnet, and invented forms in extending the philosophical-scientific tradition of poets such as Stevens, Ammons, Marianne Moore, and Kay Ryan in rich harmonics wholly his own. "Consigned to no one time, but to continuous / Tempos, their racings, my racings, their easing, mine."

Volume IX in the Granite State Poetry Series

HENRY WALTERS was born in Chicago in 1984 and grew up in Clinton, Michigan. After studying Classics at Harvard University and in Rome under the late Reginald Foster, he lived as a falconer's apprentice in Ireland and a beekeeper's assistant in Sicily before returning to the United States, where he has worked as a seasonal biologist, postal carrier, census-taker, gardener, carpenter, baseball coach, actor, teacher, playwright, and birding guide. His poems, translations, reviews, and essays have appeared in periodicals such as The Threepenny Review, The Yale Review, Orion, Literary Imagination, and New Letters. His collection Field Guide A Tempo was a finalist for the 2016 Kate Tufts Discovery Award. He lives in New Hampshire with his young family, a hive of bees, and a hawk.