Holly Haworth “trace[s] the moon through the traceless sky” in this meditation on time’s cyclical nature and how it slips away—and on writing as a way of time-keeping, poetry a tool for etching memory. Here we find Haworth no less in thrall to language than to the land. As she probes the failure of words to capture the world, she puts us under a spell, enlivening our hearts with nature and mystery. Moments become visceral acts of communion, of sensual presence. There is a devotion here both to the death that is inherent to time’s passing, and to the life that is constantly arising. Mournful lament and exuberant praise, The Way the Moon compels us to stop in our tracks and savor even the losses.
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Holly Haworth’s The Way the Moon shares its being with the moon itself, and the poems know what the moon knows: that the light we shine is never ours alone. Each new line break, breath, and page takes me further into the truth that even the smallest of us, and the most hurting, carry the whole Earth within. Or, as the poet writes, “Love is not born once but must / give birth to itself again & again.” This astonishing debut lives in my heart next to Louise Glück’s The Wild Iris and CD Wright’s Casting Deep Shade. Haworth has given us transformation, a true work of art.
— Rebecca Gayle Howell, author of Render / An Apocalypse and American Purgatory
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Haworth’s collection is a gorgeous recital of “clear-throated singing,” a hymn to and for a creation that has not yet (despite humankind’s best intentions) been divested of the numinous. What does one do when a place becomes “everything I needed?” One needs more, and better; differently, and in present tense. The sumptuous poems record the fulfillment and enlargement of a desire that is both satiated by and reflected urgently in the observed world, the all that is not-I, the not-self. Their opulence gleams and rings in the “cast-iron night.”
— G.C. Waldrep, author of The Earliest Witnesses
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In Holly Haworth’s debut book of poems, The Way the Moon, the speaker whispers, “I am abandoned to the land.” And this quiet abandonment allows multitudes of beings of the Blue Ridge Mountains to shimmer and speak. I trust Haworth’s earned bodily intimacy, with her “basketsful of nettle/ armsful of fennel,” the lived knowing, the sorrowful and ecstatic inside these poems. I want to read these lyric spells by candlelight, by moonlight—slip from human habit and disperse into this enchanted, tangled wild place.
— Anne Haven McDonnell, author of Breath on a Coal and recipient of a 2023 NEA poetry fellowship
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The Way the Moon spellbinds. The poems yearn. And yodel. The poems see. And pine. Together we wander with Haworth over her homeland loams. Somewhere Dorothy Wordsworth keeps time with an apple-switch while Dock Boggs sings like a coyote full of rabbit and rain. Haworth gifts us nothing short of the sublime. I had to sit while reading these poems because they floored me. I had to stand and do a little dance because Haworth’s musics would not let my knees keep still. Such is the fecund gambol you are in for, Dear Reader. And I have a mind to plant each and all of her heirloom words. And I’ll be hoping for a rhubarb the size of a cathedral. Let’s all meet there soon. Next full moon.
— Abraham Smith, author of Insomniac Sentinel and Dear Weirdo
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