Real Country by Michael Harty

Reading Michael Harty’s Real Country is living country life through “a tangle of tumbleweeds” and prairie grasses, through fencelines and ditches filled with rain where boys could “wriggle in the brown currents like naked salamanders” and at night be “serenaded by the shrill/pulsing of little frogs.” We see through the eyes of a young boy who has” drunk too deeply of all that space around [him]” and whose life is full of boyhood antics from learning to shoot guns, play knife games, or feel “entranced by the music of smashing jars.” Harty’s West Texas means country schools, eventful school bus rides, hayrides, and someone always getting into trouble during a time when a quarter bought lunch, a nickel a Milky Way, schools practiced under-the-desk drills, and boys who picked fights still got paddled. These well-crafted and precise poems vibrate with details that make us feel we’ve lived there ourselves.
–Maryfrances Wagner, Missouri Poet Laureate 2021-2023, The Immigrants’ New Camera

This beautiful collection by Michael Harty is a true and sometimes humorous venture into his past. From “Storm Shelter” to “What Jesus` Would Do” to “Country School”, the journey is original and remarkable and it is truly a profound gift for all of us.

–Arlin Buyert, Editor, Open to the Sky, Vols. 1, 2, and 3 (Prisoner poems), Author, Family Photos and Oh Say Can You See