True North

The poems in Charles O. Hartman’s second collection brilliantly investigate the difference between the world and our readings of it. We come away from these astonishing poems moved and exhilarated by their timely evocation of our human power not so much to make sense of the world as, in fact, to create it.

Charles O. Hartman writes with clear authority and wit. His poems are a gracefully intelligent surmise of life and its accumulations, of how we did and didn’t get here.”

Robert Creeley

Whatever branch you dreamed,
It sprouted leaves, bore fruit,
Gardened itself, redeemed
The old dispute
In a dream. You woke and found
The garden all deranged—
But everything around
A little changed.