Books published by Antrim House

The poems in John Muro''s first book, In the Lilac Hour & Other Poems, move with a sure hand between closed forms (especially sonnets), invented forms, poems after writers like Keats and Frost, and free verse; and they are committed to seeing and honoring the passing of seasons, of friends and family, and to the birds and flowers that constitute the local reality of our everyday lives. Looking closely and surely at the world around him, Muro''s descriptive abilities are everywhere apparent: the crack of a screen door shutting lingers "long on pneumatic air"; a pear is a "tilted Buddha"; swans are "high, heavy clouds / idly set upon the water"; cardinal flowers are "incendiary petal flare, the arching thrust / Of fireworks in descent." But the poems always widen from a series of exacting and fresh images to a wider context-the diminishing habitat of Lady Slippers or a Swainson''s Thrush running up against the glass windows of a suburban house. These deft and heartfelt poems trace our connections and disconnections to nature, community, and family while amplifying and celebrating life.  

Over the years, Cortney Davis'' vocation as a nurse has placed her with human beings who find themselves over the threshold of injury or illness, or on the threshold of dying, at times crossing over.  Her vocation as a poet has allowed her to take these liminal moments, or hours, with patients and turn them into poems written with fearlessness, clarity, and compassion.

A chronological series of poems depicting the life of a cancer patient in the first year of his male breast cancer treatment. Moving, often witty, both reverent and irreverent, the book is a praise song written with courage and good humor. Eamon Grennan has called it "a wonder." He goes on to say, "With undaunted courage, insight and an always ready, irrepressibly generous humor even in the face of mortal illness, these poems are brief, brilliant testaments to the poet's stubborn will to praise, to celebrate the radiant ongoingness of the natural and human worlds that he has taken, it seems, into his care."