Edward Haworth Hoeppner
Edward Haworth Hoeppner was born in Winona, Minnesota, where he graduated from Saint Mary's University. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Iowa in 1984, and is the author of Echoes and Moving Fields: Structure and Subjectivity in the Poetry of W. S. Merwin and John Ashbery. His poems have appeared in Indiana Review, The Ohio Review, Prairie Schooner, Shenandoah, Willow Springs, and elsewhere. He teaches at Oakland University and lives in Rockford, Michigan.
Also by Edward Haworth Hoeppner
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Rain Through High Windows
 Rain Through High Windows
$12.00 paper | 72 Pages
ISBN: 978-0-932826-92-3
Publication Date: April 2000
Buy: Amazon.com
These poems slow the planet so gradually that all adapt to its halt; one forgets that time should be passing, accepts the poet's "static divine" and lets "hours line up like saints." Each poem loses us further in Hoeppner's wilderness: his natural world is held lightly on the tongue until it dissolves; his patience allows us to listen as "the full moon in soft Italian whispers off the balcony, parsing bluish dust . . . " This is a book that finds peace not in consequence but in the innocence of result, the slip into what comes after.
"In the beautiful structures of Rain Through High Windows we meet a poet at nearly perfect peace with change, a poet gifted to shape masses with the most astonishing delicacy. Hoeppner is an architectural clairvoyant, and he reveals the eternal farewell encoded in all forms. I have never said this of any other poet of my generation, and I say it with absolute certainty: Edward Haworth Hoeppner is a Poet of the Sublime."
—Donald Revell
"With an elegant shapeliness to the rhythm and a rhythmic elegance to the shape, these poems lift out graciously from the self into lush, sensuous landscapes. They are testimonies to the wisdom that it isn't so much the loudest voice we hear that stays with us the longest, but the quiet voice. The one that dives down deeply and settles in."
—Nance Van Winckel
"Edward Haworth Hoeppner has written an almost heroically original book that does double duty as a document of compelling and genuine tenderness for others. No poems that I know are more uninsistent, yet, for living in these poems, the reader comes away changed. Hoeppner is a very smart poet, yet his accomplishment rises from his simultaneous faith in the imagination and in a forthright and loving artfulness. He comes off sounding like no one else in the world."
—Rodney Jones
Poem
Its Thousand Pale Shadows
The orchard fills with cold
rain, pencil thick, my ghost.
How long it seems to fall
and the smaller wild apples.
I set my hand above my eyes,
water forking down the bones
across my face, but only see
what I am hearing: rain,
light draining from the earth.
If I am not yet finished
understanding how my father
loves me, I would like to know.
There are a few leaves fixed
on these branches and this rain
strikes them as if statues
smaller than his thumbs were
come to life, were diving
from the shelves in Our Museum
of the Flood, water filled
the long and narrow halls.
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