Boy Singing to Cattle is
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About Boy Singing to Cattle:
Boy Singing to Cattle is at once a moving elegy for a lost parent, a portrait of a way of life, and of the landscape and community tied to it, and a reconciliation with the past. It is remarkable for its wisdom, for its generosity of spirit. These poems continue to haunt me in their grittiness, their loveliness, their eloquence; for the heart that informs every poem. Boy Singing to Cattle renews and refreshes the tradition of poetry about the land and those who live from it in ways I would not have thought possible in the 21st century.
--Andrea Carter Brown
“Let planting bring me to my knees,” writes Mark Hart at the end of his poem “Planting Garlic.” And this is exactly what he has done through his wonderful book Boy Singing to Cattle. He has let his relationship to the people and places and things that he loves dictate a kind of reverence that is without cant or pomposity. This is a voice to trust. Hart has found a way to welcome home even the most difficult of experiences. What a beautiful and beautifully courageous book.
—Jim Moore
Hart’s sensitivity to detail and gift for metaphor and imagery create a vivid and intimate portrait of his father and how the family farm instilled in him a sense of mortality and wonder. The poems here are as much about redemption as they are about loss. Lyrical depth and narrative detail combine in close observations of family life, human frailty, death and grief and lead the reader to revelation and hope. Through the landscape of memory, Hart looks at the past with honesty and compassion. These poems “sing from the deep well inside him.”
—Michelle Gillette
Boy Singing to Cattle is at once a moving elegy for a lost parent, a portrait of a way of life, and of the landscape and community tied to it, and a reconciliation with the past. It is remarkable for its wisdom, for its generosity of spirit. These poems continue to haunt me in their grittiness, their loveliness, their eloquence; for the heart that informs every poem. Boy Singing to Cattle renews and refreshes the tradition of poetry about the land and those who live from it in ways I would not have thought possible in the 21st century.
--Andrea Carter Brown
“Let planting bring me to my knees,” writes Mark Hart at the end of his poem “Planting Garlic.” And this is exactly what he has done through his wonderful book Boy Singing to Cattle. He has let his relationship to the people and places and things that he loves dictate a kind of reverence that is without cant or pomposity. This is a voice to trust. Hart has found a way to welcome home even the most difficult of experiences. What a beautiful and beautifully courageous book.
—Jim Moore
Hart’s sensitivity to detail and gift for metaphor and imagery create a vivid and intimate portrait of his father and how the family farm instilled in him a sense of mortality and wonder. The poems here are as much about redemption as they are about loss. Lyrical depth and narrative detail combine in close observations of family life, human frailty, death and grief and lead the reader to revelation and hope. Through the landscape of memory, Hart looks at the past with honesty and compassion. These poems “sing from the deep well inside him.”
—Michelle Gillette