Restless for Words: Poems by DeWitt Henry

DeWitt Henry’s lively riffs reveal how restless language can be as it shimmers and shifts from noun to verb, from history to headlines. Henry urges, like Sir Philip Sydney, to “look in thy heart and write,” as his chosen words, examined like life, fashion a bittersweet biography. These poems—each a collage of feeling and thought—are witty, satisfying, and always revealing.

–Joyce Peseroff, author of Petition

DeWitt Henry is best known and universally admired as the founder of Ploughshares and as an eloquent writer of fiction and non-fiction. So it should now come as no surprise that he’s reinvented a lost genre of poetry. These poems, on an astonishing array of subjects, are the wittiest, most verbally playful, most thoughtful and touching and personal essay-poems since Alexander Pope. DeWitt Henry has welcomed poets to his world for decades. It’s a great pleasure to welcome him to the world of poetry.

–Lloyd Schwartz, Pulitzer Prize-winning critic and author of Who’s on First? New and Selected Poems

Restless for Words is a huge gathering and sorting process by a writer who has thought deeply about a great many things. It’s a repository for the best answers he’s been able to come up with in a lifetime of inquiry and curiosity, guided by a commitment to clarity and to trying to see what’s the right thing to do…. My favorites are those that explore the etymological and let themselves riff on the resulting associations, a strategy that Henry used to great purpose in Sweet Marjoram. These poems are solid, and their complications stanza to stanza arise from wonder.  Henry wastes no time on the mucker pose, the ‘Aw shucks gee whiz’ persona.  He takes life—and writing—and learning—much too seriously for that.  And I, for one, am grateful.

–Richard Hoffman, author of Noon Into Night