Finding Pahaquarra by D. Scott Humphries

Finding Pahaquarra is its own portage, where we carry ourselves between the rivers of the past and present.  Through these poems we experience the immediacy of boys leaping into the ice, or rafting down the Delaware, or a father who sings his wake-up call of 76 trombones.  Yet haunting and layering these memories are the ghosts both of the Lenape who first inhabited Pahaquarra, and the bittersweet longing of one man’s return.  “Quiet in heart of forest, endless pine and birch, oak nearly bald now in the bright November sun… but among people… unsure of what to say …I’d  been more articulate living in lands where I didn’t speak or hold the tongue…”  Humphries journey may evoke our own inarticulate dialogue with the past.

–Priscilla Orr (Jugglers and Tides, 1997, and Losing the Horizon, 2013, both from Hannacroix Creek Books)

“Where we came to so long ago is now the place we come from,” Humphries writes in the opening poem of his collection Finding Pahaquarra. These poems combine a personal history and a collective one — a past we are unable to imagine, and a future just as inconceivable. These poems are full of humor, love, tragedy and triumph, which is to say, they are about survival, and all the ways we forge an identity in a confusing and ever changing world. The places we come from seep into us, the way flood waters seep into cornfields. These poems are full of word play and internal rhyme, they take us places we couldn’t foresee going, upriver, rafting, tramping, “driving into progress” and then they bring us back home. In Finding Pahaquarra Humphries has found his very own Paumanok.

–Jason Irwin (Watering the Dead, 2008, Pavement Saw Press, and A Blister of Stars, 2016, Low Ghost Press)

The poems in Finding Pahaquarra remind us that sense of place is nearly inseparable from sense of self. Scott Humphries journeys through childhood terrain and adult terrain—places that are sometimes one and the same, sometimes worlds apart. He explores history, memory, family, love, and loss with clarity and wisdom. And heart—most of all heart. In Finding Pahaquarra, we find poems that show us “how to see a soul and touch it.” After reading this collection, you will discover that Scott Humphries has seen and touched your soul.

–Jean LeBlanc (A Field Guide to the Spirits, 2015, and Ancient Songs of Us, 2019, both from Aqueduct Press)