Deerbrook Editions

Harvest Time is a book of sometimes profound memories

Endorsed by Eve Anthony Hanninen

A voice that gathers in the reader and turns the lines from prose to poetry in an unexpected moment. Those twists are something I’ve tried to encourage in many poets. And Martin Willitts Jr. does them so well. Willitts’ Harvest Time  is born of “barn light”—in those moments “when the sun finds its way through wood cracks and dust.” From the outset, peering through such a crack, we readers arrive with Martin, then a boy, at his grandparents’ farm in spring. We watch his world of hard work come alight as boy turns poet with his tongue on fire, even as he must politely sell produce from the roadside stand.

Throughout the book, how simple but evocative the imagery, so carefully chosen, those peach slices in canning jars, and “white lies [mixed in] with the buttermilk,” while readers and poet huddle, shoulder to shoulder in the conspiracy that is storytelling.

On through summer to harvest, Willitts continues to make fires in your imagination with the kindling of his bright, dark, and sometimes profound memories. He places them for you carefully, “each log, each twig.” So, you remain and burn as he builds the framework of a hard life, shiny with blood and wonders. The boy, the man, the poet shows you, in every line, how “survival depends on getting ahead of the hardness.” This is done by marveling in the milkweed and swallowtail explosions that come unbidden, even as you grieve the end of a suffering horse you cannot bear to shoot.

You will find amidst Willitts’ poignant words, his ironies and humor, a deep silence threading throughout — a thread of eternal, unspoken language that stitches together his past with its ever-present insistence that you listen. It’s a language you’ll know; it’s one of “goldenrod opening,” and “a dog’s ear perking.”

—Eve Anthony Hanninen, poet, illustrator, and editor of The Centrifugal Eye: Celebration of Poets

Endorsed by Megan Merchant

Inside this collection are poems of great patience and attention. As Willitts writes, “I fell into earth like seed”—so too does the reader, into a remarkable flow of poems. Each page is an act of deep listening, and an ache of nostalgia that is tethered to simplicity; heirlooms, spinning wool, and  horseshoes—bringing to life the sacred, the connection to land and difficult work, love, anger, and questioning. Because time moves at the pace of lessons learned, true wisdom and beauty are able to shine through. Skilled with arrangement, Willitts is able to draw the reader into each poem as an experience, each carefully chosen word on the page like “adding a pinch of salt to make things rise”. The finished product—“a waterfall/ just before a river rushes to leap over”.

—Megan Merchant, author of Grief Flowers