ABOUT THIS BOOK

Harry Humes carved out a unique place in American literature by chronicling Appalachian working-class life, natural landscapes, and disappearing rural traditions in Appalachian Pennsylvania with rare lyricism, humility, and precision. He wrote unflinchingly about the austerity and horrors of extraction as well as his deep connection with family and the area mountains and valleys not gutted by the anthracite coal industry.

This volume of Humes’s new and selected poems not only preserves the work of a significant American poet, offering scholars, teachers, and general readers a generous overview of the clarity, beauty, craft, and emotional depth of his substantial body of work. It allows future generations to rediscover poetry that deepens our understanding of how our labor, our landscapes, and our love shape us and change the ways we live and what we care about.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Harry Humes (1935–2025) was the author of fourteen collections of poetry and was a longtime professor of English at Kutztown State University.

REVIEWS

"Here is the breadth of a life attentive to yarrow and cicadas, damselflies and bloodroot. Like the trout he loved, Harry Humes wrote poems of lithe beauty, of moving grace. He mapped his home ground in Appalachia line by line, showing us the hurt of those who mined it but never allowing us to forget how nature might still heal it."—Todd Davis, author of Ditch Memory: New & Selected Poems

“Harry Humes is a poet of Appalachia, a regional poet in the very best sense. He knows the mountains of central Pennsylvania, the anthracite country, with intimacy and affection, the past, the geology, the stories, the people. The poems of Going Across the Water delve deep into the bonds that make us human, as Harry’s ancestors delved into the earth to find coal. The poems are sometimes tragic, often surprising, the voice authentic, always inspiring.” — Robert Morgan, author of To Honor the Imagined Whole: Poems

“Harry Humes’ poems are uniquely rich with the kind of detail that creates a life fully lived—crows, dead skunk, a land running orange with mine drainage, spoons lying in a pile on the oil cloth. The clarity of the poems always carries a depth of feeling and understanding. It’s a service to poetry to have these “new” poems. And I’m glad to be reminded of the older ones. They're not so much elegy to a difficult world as a celebration of being alive.” — Fleda Brown, author of The End-of-the-Line Club: A Diary

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Harry Humes Biography

Harry Humes Bibliography

Foreword
Some Words for Harry Humes
BY BRUCE WEIGL

Born from Anthracite
The Enduring Relevance of Harry Humes’s Poetry
BY MICHAEL GARRIGAN

Harry Humes’s Appalachia
An Appreciation of His Poems and Some Notes on How This Book Came to Be
BY DANIEL DONAGHY

from Winter Weeds, Devins Award Winner, University of Missouri Press, 1983

Winter Weeds
The Man Who Carves Whales
Something More
The Rain Walkers
The Spheres of October
Dead Animals
The Muskellunge
Hunting for North in the Fog
He Dreams of a Hawk
The New Site of the Calvary Temple
Bird Feeder
Safety Zone
The Coyote in the Orchard
Whales
Air Burial
The Woman Who Loved Wool
February Woods

from Robbing the Pillars, chapbook, Adastra Press, 1984

Robbing the Pillars
Photographs of Men, Dogs, and Foxes at Stine’s Corner
Coal Pickers
The Miners’ Vacation
All the Ways Back
Walking the Anthracite

from Throwing Away the Compass, chapbook, Silverfish Review Press, 1986

Horses by Muddy Water
Cave Song

from Ridge Music, University of Arkansas Press, 1987

Entrails
Words for the End of a Pond
Releasing the Minnows
On Not Fishing the Brodhead This Year
The Long Habit of Fire
Building a Tower
The Man Who Loved Fish
The Man Who Smuggled Life into Work Day After Day
Listening to One Thing at a Time
To My Brother This Night on the Delaware River
Waiting in the Crow Roost, He Thinks of the Woman Who Went Back to the City
Gifts by the Edge of the Woods
The Photograph
At the Shad Festival
The Last Miner Is Found
White Birch Father
Mountain Lake with Stumps
One Approach to the Steppes
Ridge Music
Improvements on Empty Space
Beehive in Early December
Caught in the Woods in the Dark
The Snow Snake
Calling in the Hawk

from A Weather of Surprises, chapbook, Heatherstone Press, 1988

Bat Fishing
The Maker of Maps Thinks of His Mother’s Death

from The Way Winter Works, University of Arkansas Press, 1990

Robbing the Pillars
The Fan House Tunnel
The Way Winter Works
Sorrow near the Old House
The Great Wilno
My Uncle’s Arm
357 Ash Alley
The Black Shoes of the Organist
The Snowy Owl
My Father Planted Tomatoes in Coal Ash
The Woman Who Called Whales Across the Field
We Will Take the New Child
Hunting Rabbits
Cleaning the Pheasant in the Fifth Month of My Wife’s Pregnancy
The Pigeon Father
The Miners’ Vacation
Deer Hunting
My Mother at Evening
At the Counting House of Buck Run Mine

from Evening in the Small Park, Owl Creek Press, 1992

The Mountains
A Weather of Surprises
The Tulpehocken
My Daughter Plays Her Bamboo Flute
Dead Bat in July
Visitors at the Beach
Evening in the Small Park
Burying the Trout in the Rain
The Lady Oboist Uses a Razor Blade to Make Her Reeds
Water Deer

from The Bottomland, University of Arkansas Press, 1995

Showing a Friend My Town
Hand Dancing
My Father Made Bamboo Fly Rods
Mine Settlement
The Cough
The Other End
Migraine
My Mother Ate Hill Dirt
My Father’s Hands
The Grand Canyon
Fox
Deer
Bear Jam
Two Beautiful Young Women
My Wife Vanishes into a Field of Sunflowers
The Bottomland
Dead Hawk
Photograph of Three Young Women on a Spill Bank

from Butterfly Effect, National Poetry Series Winner, Milkweed Editions, 1999

First Light
From the Apple Tree
Rabbit Scare
Leah Tree
Butterfly Effect
River Vows
Fishing the Little J Beneath the Methodist Church
Astray
The Fall
The Yellow House
My Mother Fished for Carp
Funeral
My Mother’s Needles

from August Evening with Trumpet, University of Arkansas Press, 2004

String
Tent Sleep
The Relocation of Rattlesnakes
Lee & Melissa, Always
The Visit
Throwing Away the Compass
My Daughter Snorkeling
Raven Run Coal Breaker
Carrying Water to the Miner
The Reply to Oregon
Small History of a House
Her Morning
Dance Hall
Hand-Me-Downs
Trout Are Moving
The River Is Quiet Tonight
August Evening with Trumpet
Gravel Song
The Movement of Ice

from Underground Singing, Keystone Chapbook Series, Seven Kitchens Press, 2007

Man with a Yellow Pail
Ash Alley
Polka for Three Dancing Elephants
Slush Dam
Answer Me This
The Bone Reader
Someone Would Have Loved
My Blue Scar
The Miner’s Lamp
Class Reunion
Underground Singing
River of Eyes
We Have Taken Trees with Us
My Ravine

from All Waters Are One, chapbook, Adastra Press, 2014

The River Keeper
Autumn’s Trout
The river I love most

from Witness Marks (unpublished book manuscript)

I

Out of the River
My Mother’s Glasses
Blue Jay
A World Without Elephants
I Have Forgotten So Many Ways

II

Saving the Haw Tree
Encounter near Water
Catfish
Darwin and the Wasp

III

June 12
Song for Hollyhocks
View Toward the Barn
April Woods
Snapping Turtles Mating
My Daughter Among Cows
Rabbit Man
The Retrieve

IV

Chair with Three Zucchini
Here Come the Mulberries
Leopard Country
The Dove
Orchard Blues
Trunk Music
The Hour Before Snow
Late November Horse

from A Memory of Silkworms (unpublished chapbook manuscript)

Colliery
Blood Soup
Underpass Petroglyphs
A History
Feeding Time
61 North

Uncollected Poems, 1976–2013

Snakeskin in June
Black Cars
Floating
Carrying the Straw Angel
Hilltop with Voices
Hunting Pheasants in Lehigh County
Gathering
My Sister’s Lawn Chair
Potatoes and Time in November
Tying Trout Flies on Shrove Tuesday
Danceland Morning
My Father’s Mine
One August I Walked
The Bootleg Coal Hole
Late November
Killdeer
Payday at the Potts
Death of a Worm Fisherman
Mine Boys
Crows, Dead Skunk
Homing Pigeons as an Answer
Our Mother’s Ring
Making a Pasty
The Way Home
Flyfishing
The Fisherman
The Stream
I Saw My Father
Tea Bags
Solstice Bird
Sitting Still at the End of the Year
Tapo Dancing
I Have Been True
The Energy That Drives the World
The Hibernian House
Gray
Minus 5
The Fire Tender’s Curses
Confession
That Place
The Miner
A Man Pissing
Funeral Food
Late Autumn Stream
History of the Hand
Whales Over the Port Clinton Fire Tower
The Map to the Bobolinks
I wanted to sit
Making a River
At the end

Talking About Girardville
HARRY HUMES INTERVIEWED BY KEVIN MCCLOSKEY

Acknowledgments

Poem Title Index