ASHLEY MACE HAVIRD
Poet and Novelist
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Ashley Mace Havird
WILD JUICE
Southern Messengers Poets/ Dave Smith, Series Editor
LSU Press 2021
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"Clean, clear, and accurate, Ashley Mace Havird’s poems are reportage from the front lines of a life intensely lived. They speak the language of vision—the image, the story, character, a world well and truly seen—and of the visionary: a vision—no—a feeling, / the moment he died, of something blasting apart, / sparks raining down. It is obvious that nothing is lost on the sentience of these poems; but to understand how Havird’s mind transforms what otherwise might be ordinary into momentary miracles is to experience, fully, the alchemy of poetry."
T. R. Hummer, author of the trilogy, Ephemeron, Skandalon, and Eon
THE GARDEN OF THE FUGITIVES
2013 X. J. Kennedy Poetry Prize
Texas Review Press 2014
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“From chinaberry trees and black widows to Pompeii and the Caymans, Ashley Mace Havird’s The Garden of the Fugitives explores a storied terrain where secrets are brought to life, characters strive and suffer, history and myth blend, ‘hawks razor’ and life swarms. ... Rife with dramas of consequence and memorable images, The Garden of the Fugitives is an accomplished collection of poems which earns its way line by line and accumulates force and delight as it unfolds.”
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R.T. Smith, Final Judge, Editor of Shenandoah and author of In the Night Orchard
Reviews in Cutbank by poet Scott Brennan and in Easy Street by writer Angela Kubinec.
Limited Edition Chapbooks
SLEEPING WITH ANIMALS
Yellow Flag Press 2013
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This limited-edition collection of 19 poems is crafted by hand from 20% cotton antique laid paper in 14 patterns. Signed by the author.
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Review by Charles Gramlich.
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Selected Online Poems by Ashley Mace Havird:
Skull Mount, Literary Matters
Turtle and Snake, Literary Matters
Habitat, Literary Matters
First Year, The Sewanee Review
Strays, Image
Earth Day, The Hound, Advent, American Journal of Poetry
Tour of Grief, Golden Dawn, Ghost Net, Cold Mountain Review
The Lost Boys, Verse Daily
Proof, Cumberland River Review
Daughter, 14, with Scissors, Shenandoah
Thanksgiving, The Cortland Review
Mosaic and Sleeping with Animals, Mediterranean Poetry
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Collections by David Havird
WEATHERING: POEMS AND RECOLLECTIONS
Mercer University Press 2020
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In WEATHERING, an aging poet greets a "phalanx" of memories and finds himself amid "an epic transmigration of echoes." At the heart of this collection of poetry and prose are three retrospective essays that narrate the adolescent poet's coming of age through encounters with such eminent elders as James Dickey, who was Havird's early mentor, Robert Lowell, and Archibald MacLeish. These prose memoirs also explore this poet's ambivalent relation to his native South and reveal the emergent cosmopolitan stance of his mature poetry. The poems, set mainly outside the South--amid the rubble of ancient Greece, in galleries at the Louvre, on hurricane-pummeled Cayman Brac--ponder mortality and metamorphosis; explore relationships, especially the complex relationships of child to parent and husband to wife; and engage with cultural artifacts--a Byzantine church, a derelict windmill, Puebloan petroglyphs--as well as traditional works of art and literature. These poems of Havird's maturity, together with a clutch of early ones rooted in the aspiring poet's youthful encounters with those elders, are elegant artifacts themselves, at once rueful and wry, thought-ridden and visionary.
MAP HOME
Texas Review Press 2013
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In the poem that opens this career-spanning odyssey, a blind weaver, who is at once a grandmotherly Penelope and a Homeric bard, "maps you home"—home finally, as the concluding poem reveals, to the Swamp Fox-haunted lowlands of Havird's native South. Along the way, which threads through Hardy's Wessex, the Greece of Homer and Seferis, and Jack London's Valley of the Moon, we take our bearings in "elliptical" terrain, as Rosanna Warren describes the typical setting—landscapes through whose gaps emerge the ghosts of memory and myth to engage the living in scenes of infinite moment.
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