Orchard Days, Finishing Line Press (Coming June 2021)
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Orchard Days (2021)Heather Bryant‘s “Orchard Days” conjures the natural world and, as suddenly as real nature itself, the sense of foreboding overtakes you, and the human reality of her story turns savage and cold, but at times also comical, absurd. The effortless yet measured breath of Bryant’s lyric voice belies a fractured universe of intimate violence. You read this collection as you do a Gothic novel of suspense; the speaker leaves myriad small clues to an abusive and cloistered marital life for the reader to find. Does the speaker need to be rescued? No, because she has already escaped, through the redemptive power of her own perception, and the wonder of motherhood, recollected in a globetrotting travelogue rendered in the watercolor of Bryant’s lines. But a menacing, distorted shadow looms over this pastel canvas, this Gothic novel in verse, even if the monster has already been vanquished. The twilight portrait of his darkened will oppressing hers—and here the biblical Eve is often invoked—blurs the glimmer of redemption promised by the “humbling” beauty of children and prelapsarian Eden. Through the blur of tears, a gifted poet has found her voice. Bryant’s voice is at times Plath-like, other times reminiscent of Mary Oliver, Marie Ponsot, even modernist masters Eliot, Frost and Williams. For, the plenitude of modern American poetry fills the sails of her verse. as the seashell echoes the sound of the sea, her speaker reclaims herself by listening to the quiet rhythms of her experience, cloistered and cosmopolitan as it is. Bryant’s “Orchard Days” is a crepuscular canvas of pastoral trauma, humble motherhood, self-recovery, and ultimately self-liberation.
–Octavio R. González, author of The Book of Ours (2009) and Misfit Modernism (2020), Associate Professor, English & Creative Writing, Wellesley College “In the best pastoral tradition, *Orchard Days* reveals its deceptively simple pastoral landscape–apple orchards, barns, and mill ponds–to be a place for pondering life’s greatest complexities. In this world that is “almost Eden,” where marriage, childbirth, and filial relationships are typically romanticized, the poet explores domestic violence (“The most dangerous time for a woman is the time when her Abuser realizes she might leave”); the mortality rate of labor and delivery (“the most dangerous thing a woman can do in America is give birth” ); and paternity uncertainty. As with Dylan Thomas’s “Fern Hill,” apple boughs and green grass momentarily mask the truth that time holds us “green and dying.” The beauty that Heather Corbally Bryant locates in the landscape, over which a harvest moon “close to tangerine” shines, makes that particular truth easier to bear.” –Donna L. Potts, Professor and Chair, Department of English, Washington State University, Pullman WA |
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Practicing Yoga in a Former Shoe Factory (2020)Heather Corbally Bryant‘s strongest collection of poems to date, a fully realised vision in this profoundly moving new collection. She remembers for us what we have forgotten, about birth, death, love, identity with a clear-eyed, honest, poetic grace. We are all the better for her vision. –Eibhear Walshe, Director, Creative Writing, School of English, University College, Cork
“Practicing Yoga in A Former Shoe Factory,” the new collection of poetry by Heather Corbally Bryant, is a quiet meditation on mortality, by turns melancholy, thoughtful and suffused with gentle humor. The poet focuses on “ordinary” moments—childbirth, a funeral, a date with a first lover, a morning in July—and reveals the deep currents that often run beneath life’s seemingly placid surface. In one poem she muses, “Maybe that’s part of my poetry—to remember what other People forget.” These poems certainly accomplish that. But they also perform another of the poet’s most important jobs. They offer the “shock of recognition,” reminding us of what we already knew but didn’t realize. –Charles Coe, author of “Memento Mori” |
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Leaving Santorini (2019)In her stunning poem “Visiting Lissadell”, Heather Bryant describes a woman who “would not have brought her gun, instead etched her name on/the glass pane, scratching out the letters with a large-cut diamond.” The poems in Leaving Santorini are grounded in similarly-etched clarity, tamping down explosive despair (at a mother’s death, at adultery or loneliness in travel) then drawing out hard-edged brilliance, radiant despite loss and risk – poems like gems of sudden unexpected beauty.” -- Carol Anne Muske-Dukes, American poet, novelist, essayist, critic, and professor, and the former poet laureate of California (2008–2011)
What I especially admire in Heather Bryant’s Leaving Santorini is the courage with which the poet engages with extremes of grief and joy (love, divorce, recovery; a mother’s death; a recuperative stay in Greece; a different sort of odyssey in Ireland), and her tenacious hold on the ordinary world in the midst of taxing emotional pressures. Admirable too is how, in grounded plain language, she can rise to touch some spiritual truths: how our departed dead can be present In the clouds, the air, the dust, everywhere; or how the recovering body can be Buoyant with the clarity of gravity and grace. The poems themselves–like a poet’s journal of sensations, observations, conclusions—hold their precious small shining moments, as a tiny bottle of coral holds her father’s spirit of adventure. By means of the poems themselves, so, the poet achieves inner and outer clarity, and it is a gift well earned. –- Eamon Grennan, Professor Emeritus of English at Vassar College |
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Assigned to Adventure, Forward (2018)The 21st Century has turned the journalistic world upside down, but the 19th and most of the 20th Century could be defined as the Golden Age of Journalism, a time when reporters were respected, even glamorous. Many went on to more famous careers as authors.
Add to that list Irene Corbally Kuhn. With an illustrious career spanning from 1920 through the 1980s she was a ground-breaking journalist working in a male-dominated profession and world. She was a trail blazer because she demonstrated an uncanny ability to write not just stories assumed best written by women, but aggressively looked for those normally held by her male counterparts. Assigned to Adventure is Irene’s personal story of her career through 1937. Originally published in 1938, this is a republished second edition with a foreword by Irene's granddaughter, Heather Corbally Bryant, a writing lecturer at Wellesley College and an author/poet of her own right. Read it for insight into what it took for a woman to be successful in that era. Read it for fun with the many humorous and engaging stories of Irene’s life as a reporter for world class newspapers such as the New York Daily News, the Paris Tribune, the Honolulu Star-Bulletin, the New York World-Telegram and Shanghai’s China Press which then transitioned into a career as a Hollywood screenwriter and radio broadcaster for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Paramount, NBC, and CBS. Through it all, you’ll quickly see that this is a woman for all ages, one to be admired by the young and old, male or female, dreamers or realists. |
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You Can't Wrap Fire in Paper (2018)Irene Corbally Kuhn, the author's grandmother, is an indomitable, inspiring and very human hero facing down challenges first on her own and then as a bride and mother in a faraway time and place. Abundant detail lends immediacy to a compelling story told with both honesty and affection. Readers will appreciate the many maps and photographs, wonderful reminders of the truth at the heart of the tale. -- Martha Freeman, Author of the First Kids Mysteries and other books.
Every Writer has a story that they absolutely must tell, and this is Heather Corbally Bryant's. Her vivid description of her grandmother's life as a foreign journalist in early-1920s Shanghai gives a glimpse into a very complicated moment in U.S.-Sino relations, but even more it is the inspiring story of a kick-ass, liberated woman insisting on taking her rightful place in her profession long before this was the norm. Although Heather and I have chatted about this story many times over the years since college, it was wonderful to be reminded once again that life is there for the taking if you have enough curiosity and grit. -- Martha Smith Lawless, Acting Director of External Relations, U.S. International Trade Commission |
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James Joyce's Water Closet (2018)Heather Corbally Bryant has given us the gift of traveling to beloved places and the people that inhabit ancient lands with wisdom and dignity. With a luminous language the poet brings us to Ireland and with her verse that is deep and melodious we accompany her to Ireland. A land a place that in Heather Corbally Bryant poetical imagination conjures a world of inner and outer beauty. Each poem is crafted with beauty and wonder and we the readers travel through Land and sea. Imagine Dublin and James Joyce with the poets eye that is generous in its Understanding of the places we inhabit in our soul.
A book that one can read so many times and find in each poem always something new to wonder and reflect. -- Marjorie Agosin, Professor of Spanish Language and Latin American Literature, Wellesley College “Heather Corbally Bryant’s latest collection of poems draws on the energies of travelogue, memoir, and family diary, to convey what the author calls “the particularity of the inconsequential.” The book captures the sense of discovery felt by the author in a foreign country, even when that country, as here, seems both strange and familiar at once. In these poems we understand the thrill and dislocation of encounter with a new landscape, and the language of the poems conveys all that warmly and affectionately, with a probing, delicate accuracy.” -- Jonathan Allison, Professor of English, University of Kentucky |
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Eve's Lament (2018) “With her previous book, “My Wedding Dress,” Heather Corbally Bryant emerged as a significant contemporary poet chronicling her year’s passage through a searing divorce. Now with “Eve’s Lament” she continues her chronicle of a woman who as yet is not herself, passing through the phases of the life that we all encounter in one way or another. Echoes of the masters–Stevens, Auden, even Einstein–surround the voice of a contemporary woman busy creating her own self.” -- George Bornstein, Patrides Professor of Literature, University of Michigan (Ann Arbor)
Having had the pleasure of reading two previous collections of Heather Bryant’s poetry, “Compass Rose” and “My Wedding Dress” I was brought to “ Eve’s Lament” with excitement. In these poems Bryant continues her journey of self-discovery with a rare insight, not only of her own life but that of her readers. In these poems we find solace, peace and a profound understanding that while suffering will always be part of life, the ordinary day can and does bring its own joy. In language that is clear and accessible, our presence “ is simply required, expected” and above all noticed. Bryant attends to the needs of those around her and to the natural world, without ever losing sight of continuing to navigate a way to the self in order to survive life with its joys and sorrows. -- Joan McBreen, Irish poet and author of Map and Atlas, among other books |
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Thunderstorm (2017)“There is in these poems the sentiment of a romantic, one who keeps a sixpence given by her father, “a pregnancy stick that turned blue,” the hospital tags worn when her twins were born and a daughter’s Mother’s Day gifts. Indeed motherhood looms large in these poems—the love received from one’s own and the love bestowed to one’s children. So many of these poems return to that theme, “March Snow, Pine Boughs” is one of the most poignant, as is “Feeding America” in which the speaker is haunted by her mother’s final (and never answered) phone message left on her answering machine— “she had something important to tell me.” The speaker in these poems sees her own growth from toddler to wife and mother and beyond on to “Wanderer.” Thunderstorm calls up the suddenness with which life can change; there is the awakening, “the unexplained gap,” the need to “stem the damage,” the allusion to an abusive relationship and infidelity, the death of parents. There is loss and the recovery from loss—both seen through the lens of nature and in the metaphor of place. The path to self-reliance and recovery is in the mountains and in wildflowers galore, flourishing—Queen Anne’s Lace, lavender, goldenrod, yellow tulips, flaming azaleas, lilacs—and it’s in the trees: greening willows, Vermont Maples, English chestnut. -- Mary Bonina, author of Clear Eye Tea and the memoir, My Father’s Eyes
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@Rob Houghton
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My Wedding Dress (2016)Heather Bryant weaves startlingly frank observations about the end of a marriage with rich and striking images that portend the loss—a blue glass perfume bottle, a print of an apple missing a slice, a half grown son’s infant anklet bracelet from the hospital nursery, oysters in Paris after a brief reconciliation—to create an alchemy of words, rich with anger, sadness, loss, and fury.
–Lynne Spigelmire Viti, JD, PhD, Senior lecturer in the Writing Program, Wellesley College Rating: ***** [5 of 5 Stars] Heather Bryant’s My Wedding Dress shows us a marriage ripped to shreds, as a husband’s infidelity takes the wife by surprise — takes her over, takes her under – and love is reconstrued as lie. Bryant’s visceral anatomizing offers an exemplum for such trauma, and — still more significantly — for the realization that one can survive the staining, the fraying, the rending. –Nathalie F. Anderson, Alexander Griswold Cummins Professor of English Literature and Director of the Program in Creative Writing Swarthmore College Rating: ***** [5 of 5 Stars] |
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Compass Rose (2016)Compass Rose is Heather Corbally Bryant's third chapbook. It traces a significant year in Bryant's life; the poems delineate an arc of death into life. The collection begins with the Bryant's mother's diagnosis of terminal cancer. It follows her mother's illness, death, and burial and remembrance. The chapbook delights in the celebration of life and the unexpected joys to be found amidst deep sorrows. The poems are rooted in love, landscape, and journey.
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Lottery Ticket (2013)Heather Corbally Bryant’s latest volume, Lottery Ticket, quietly ponders the many risks inherent in living and loving, balancing love and loss in poems that build slowly and powerfully, pulling us in with a steady, calm voice. Her deceptively simple style, reminiscent of such American poets as Edward Taylor and Emily Dickinson, draws deeply on the metaphysical tradition. This is a philosophical, meditative poetry, rich in irony, wit, and paradox, as the book’s title poem aptly demonstrates. There we encounter an elderly woman, moving alone in “Late afternoon November gloom,” to trade in her dollars on a vain hope:
One by one, she scratches each Digit with the rounded edges of A shiny nickel, eyebrows knitted And knotted, she turns up a loser Five times over. Bryant ends the poem on a ruefully ironic note: “who was to think / that she would be so lucky?” (39). -- Caroline Collins, Assistant Professor of Humanities, Andrew College |
Photograph copyright Mary Kocol Photography
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Cheap Grace (2011)'We only get one shot,' Heather Jordan finds, in her poem memorializing photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson; and 'Cheap grace' is filled with her own quick takes, perceptions caught up from our fast-fleeting world; 'ice turning to water' at the shore line, 'air begin[nning] to lighten' after a week's rain, the 'skin' of shag-bark hickory 'peeling down the trunk,' a baby's arms 'raised up high once in startled reflex' at its christening--'now you/see it, now you don't,' Heather Jordan shows us, urging us to keep our eyes open for all such instances of grace.
-- Nathalie F. Anderson, Professor of English Literature and Director of the Program in Creative Writing, Swarthmore College. |
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How Will the Heart Endure (1992)How Will the Heart Endure: Elizabeth Bowen and the Landscape of War views the Anglo-Irish writer Elizabeth Bowen (1899-1973) through the lens of war. Winner of the Donald R. Murphy Prize, Jordan's book examines Bowen's novels, short stories, autobiographies, and essays in the context of the wars that defined her life: the Troubles, the Irish Civil War, World War One and World War Two. The devastation of these wars defined the intensely personal vision of loss and betrayal conveyed in her fiction. How Will the Heart Endure is the first sustained study of Bowen as a creative writer in time of war.
Jordan's study combines historical, textual, and original archival research to provide a new reading both of Bowen's work and of the wartime publishing climate. Her circle of friends included Virginia Woolf, T.S. Eliot, John and Rosalind Lehmann, Cyril Connolly, Evelyn Waugh, Graham Greene, Stephen Spender, and Sean O'Faolain. |