William Heyen

Costmary Press

FYEO : Zen Marriage Muse : Loan

Shoah Train

Poems of the Holocaust

Erika

Erika, Poems of the Holocaust

A long poem considers war, agriculture, and the rebirth of America

The Chestnut Rain

Explores questions that all creative writers need to think about as they write

Prose on Poetry

Pig Notes & Dumb Music

Over 125 American writers reflect on September 11 in its immediate aftermath.

American Writers Respond

September 11, 2001

This collection of poems explores the collision between a civilization of western time and one of primal timelessness.

Poems

Crazy Horse in Stillness

Long respected for bringing his poetic vision to histories, stories and legends, William Heyen captures the successes and shortcomings of the world's most visible family - The Royals. Through poems that both startle and delight, Diana, Charles, & the Queen reimagines the lives of those born and wed into the House of Windsor. A young Elizabeth contemplates love while crying into a cloth woven by Mahatma Gandhi; a gallant Charles courts a wide-eyed Diana with anecdotes of his travels; and Mother Teresa reads in the papers about Diana giving "the royal finger/to a photographer who'd crowded her/once too often." Gradually, we see the marriage of Diana and Charles crumbling, and the Windsors contemplating their role in Britain's future.

Diana, Charles, & the Queen

American Poets in 1976

H. L. Hix

Dante Di Stefano

In the third Tribus by Etruscan Press, we present work by poets of three generations: William Heyen, H. L. Hix, and Dante Di Stefano. It was Di Stefano's new book, Lullaby with Incendiary Device, which inspired this tribute to three generations. Lullaby is deeply immersed in a soon-to-be-realized future, in which Di Stefano's daughter faces an array of 21st century challenges. Upon receiving this submission, we came to think about the concerns that have shaped the poetry of Heyen and Hix, our two flagship poets, and we decided that a Tribus, joining work which has defined Etruscan over the past twenty years, would be the best way to advance the dialogue. For the last half century, Heyen's poetry has explored world history, from Nature, to Native Americans, to the Holocaust and the atom bomb, the Iraq Wars, to the British Royals. His driving, eclectic force is unmatched in contemporary poetry. In this book, Heyen presents another entry into his Holocaust opus, The Nazi Patrol. H. L. Hix's work is also inextricably involved with the world, as seen in a recent collection, American Anger, which explores the psychology of rage underneath recent political turmoil, and God Bless, adapted from the speeches of George W. Bush and the tirades of Osama Bin Laden. Yet, his work also turns inward, creating new forms to join the world and the inner life. This theme is most prominent here, in How It Is That We. So, three generations look backward, forward, and inward. But chronology is not the most salient feature of this book of generations. Presented here are three books which thread through our sense of identity, being both deeply personal and also somehow liberated from the narrative of biography. Spare, profuse, elusive--these poems reveal how we are versions of one another while also that there never will be another. They present originality through which the prime echoes anew. The sensibility behind Generations is perhaps best expressed in a recent letter from H. L. Hix. "To live by poetry. Which of course I want to read in more than one sense; live robustly and fully by means of poetry; order one's life according to values derived from poetry; live in proximity to poetry."

Generations: Lullaby with Incendiary Device, the Nazi Patrol, and How It Is That We

A reissuing of Depth of Field, the debut collection of poems by William Heyen.

William Heyen

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