POETRY BY ANNETTE HAYN

EXPANDED SECOND EDITION OF ANNETTE HAYN'S NEW AND SELECTED POEMS.

Chamber Music was first published in September 2001, and was Annette Hayn's last book. She died in September 2004. The book was re-issued by The Poet's Press in Spring 2009 with new material: the poet's last, posthumous poems (Memorial to the Moon) and a memoir by poet Mary Ferrari. This 152-page book brings together the poet's best mature work, plus her own selections of the best poems from her earlier books, Rapunzel (1971), One-Armed Flyer (1976), Journeys Around One Point (1980), The Crossing (1984), Calendar House (1990), and Enemy on the Way to School (1994). Annette believed that Chamber Music in 2001 would be her last book, but the final group of poems added for this edition demonstrate that she was still in peak form. This finely-etched, spare poetry, influenced greatly by the example of her early teacher, Kenneth Koch, intersperses the everyday with the surrealistic, walks bravely among her worlds: childhood in Nazi Germany, boarding school in England, family life and the discovery of poetry writing in America, and her final years overshadowed by 9/11 and her own confrontation with mortality.

ISBN 978-0922558377. Paperback, 152 pages, $14.95. CLICK HERE to order paperback from Amazon. Or, CLICK HERE to order the PDF e-book for $3.00 from Payhip.

Enemy On The Way to School. New second printing for 2016. Poems of a German Jewish childhood in the 1930s. Set against the background of the rising Nazi menace, these poems leave an indelible impression of a lost world, and the eternal alienation felt by those who left it behind. With an introduction by poet Mary Ferrari.

... Now I’m walking backwards on
this German avenue (I feel quite
safe) in boots under a narrow
moon, past the mysterious fire
walking to where my mother
knew I loved her
to where the Stürmer printed
lies on giant columns on every
street — a Jew with crooked nose and
evil eyes. some boys
cornered me —
walking to where our dog hid from
the birthday party where dragons sang
and shadows carried guns
to where the Nibelungen,
the wronged dwarfs—

I stepped on the white berry
made a popping sound. the lady in the
moss house drifted down the river.
I held four dolls. Siegfried revived
his dragon. the streetsigns marched
saluted, turned around..

*** ***

Edith and I, the only
girls in the battle. Flushed,
out of breath, we piled snow bullets
on a sled while our mothers
looked for us all over Breslau.

Another time
we threw our dolls downhill
to see if they could fly (they did
for a moment)
but hers was made of porcelain
and had to have new eyes.

It was all a game:
the enemies in boots parading
down the street, fathers
losing their jobs, getting arrested.
But that came afterwards. First

we were six —
Nazis and Jews together
in a garden. I can’t remember
who was who
— flinging snow bullets
at enemies across the fence
until the sun went down
and our mothers found us.

*** ***

ANNETTE HAYN. ONE ARMED FLYER.

This chapbook was first published by The Poet's Press in 1976. Although framed as a personal book — an elegy for her late husband Gerald Hayn — it is the work of an experienced poet who worked in miniature, with restraint and pinpoint language. The foreword by Toby Olson summed up why this book was worth publishing, and still worth reading:

"Our people have a variety of ways of leaving us. Our children grow up, our parents age, loved ones die. But in an ironic and certainly poignant sense, the presence of those lost grows stronger in their absence. This is because the fact of their passing changes our total feel for things, and their fixed presence seldom does that. In the poems in One Armed Flyer, Annette Hayn speaks of a world in which loss is central. It is a world that extends only so far as her own life extends, but it is rendered universal through the clarity of the poet's vision. The central force of these poems lies in their quiet attempt to understand and express the changes that loss causes. The result is a book of poems, painful, touching, and exact, that speaks to a basic human need. For the readers of Annette Hayn's poems, loss is a kind of gain."

The book is not monothematic, since the poet has included some fine poems that stand on their own, such as her portrait of the biblical Delilah, and the delightful fantasy, "Unlikely Marriage" in which John Ashbery and Emilie Dickinson set up housekeeping in a doll house.

With the release of this ebook facsimile, The Poet's Press continues the republication of the best books from our archives.

The 218th publication of The Poet's Press. PDF, 4 x 7 inches, 64 pages. To download and read this FREE Ebook, CLICK HERE.

ANNETTE HAYN. JOURNEYS AROUND ONE POINT.

This chapbook was first published under The Poet's Press Grim/Reaper Books imprint in 1980. The foreword by Mary Ferrari provides special perspective on Annette Hayn's work.

"Annette Hayn 's poems are composed of several disparately colored threads tied peculiarly together; several streaks of light running through a few lines as quickly and intently as a cat, through
leaves.

She is a poet of both the fantastic far away and the realistic near. She gives us images from a childhood lived within the shadow of a mountain-climbing mother and Hitler's Germany. Her contemporary views are no less exciting; have always about them a hint of theatre. Her sometimes stormy patches of domesticated nature go a
long way emotionally; and are reminiscent of Emily Dickinson.

Each poem is an oblique glimpse through a small intensely lighted window. One looks in a window at the apparently necessary destruction of "roses / a woman ... " Another looks out: " ... and now the mugger can be seen clearly —".

Hayn's poems are miniatures in watercolor; have need of almost no beginning or end; catch that balloon, that voice in flight; are truly "journeys around one point": Annette Hayn's powerful sensibility."

With the release of this ebook facsimile, The Poet's Press continues the republication of the best books from our archives.

The 219th publication of The Poet's Press. PDF, 4 x 7 inches , 64 pages. To download and read this FREE Ebook, CLICK HERE.

Version 24. Updated February 24, 2024