Announcing the publication of “Moonbird”

Moonbird

From its elegant square shape and wrap-around cover design to Henry G. Stanton’s lovely and powerful center-justified lyric meditations, Moonbird is a true pleasure to hold, behold, and read.

In a central poem, “Names,” Stanton proclaims, “I want to hear your heart,” and he successfully hears many others—humans, plants, and animals (“Saw-Whet Owl, for example)— and presents them all in accessible, but complex modes, and through these presentations, the reader gets to know Stanton himself more intimately. One thing poetry can do well, and Stanton succeeds splendidly.

In “Songbird” Stanton begins, “There is no way to say this / you have to see it / sing,” and then goes on to describe “this one for instance” in great and evocative detail as a painter might—and, indeed, Stanton is also a wonderful painter and captures in both words and paintings so much of today’s world. Please look at this paintings, too, https://brightportfal.com/henry-stanton-artwork-archive/.

Moonbird also features elegies and in them Stanton tries to connect to both the dead and the grieving— and he succeeds so well. I cannot recommend this book more highly. Alan Bern, Poet

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Moonbird is beautiful, stunning, artistic, and the prosody profound and moving. I am attached to these poems, having previously read them over and over, and I remember every single one. You are a poet’s poet.  Thank you for enlightening the world with your humanity and imagination. Sandra Fluck, Editor & Writing Consultant, The Write Launch

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I adore Moonbird.  You have a wonderful ear.  I particularly love the poem, Baja.

Henry Stanton has written a lovely book of poetry here that manages to just straddle the line between the personal and the universal. His ear is excellent and his eye discerning. This is not a book for people who think that a poet should be object or distant from their material. This is not a book for readers who cannot stomach big emotions or see genuine feeling as sentimentality. A fine collection, beautifully produced.
Joel Peckham, writer of Much

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This collection is so aptly named. A moonbird implies beauty, nature, life, where you wouldn’t expect to find it–a wing launched from basalt rock. Take, for example, the poem “Router Error.” I love the tonal shift from exasperation—the speaker threatening to “rip out that cord” of that maddening hardware and cast it into water—to sudden dark wonder at finding “lovely young frightening” Ophelia, staring up from below the surface. You never see what’s coming in Moonbird. You think it’s one thing, and then the kaleidoscope of Stanton’s eye reveals something else, startling and new. So richly layered. Rachel Peckham, Poet and University Professor