Richard Hague

Studied Days - Poems Early & Late in Appalachia Richard Hague

Poetry. STUDIED DAYS sings with strange and sensual enchantment, calling the reader into that other time, that other 'halfway place of slopes' where human longing assumes memory's abiding shapes. Know the well with its 'single eye of moonlight shimmer[ing] at the bottom, forty lean years deep.' Study the woman in the night, naked and sleeping upon creek stone, only one dream away from betrayal--and consider, too, how the bearded, bloodied, drunken man stumbles through 'frog-slicked ditches' toward experience's ripening truth. The Appalachian Ohio landscapes of Hague's early manhood hold the lonely language of birds, insects, dark waters--it is here where the dead must rise to assume 'the holy duties of their flesh' and where the living keep 'going down' to make sense of the shadowy places beyond home. Exuberance and grief entwine in this stunning narrative collection. --Sherry Cook Stanforth