Book Details
Camera Obscura is a collection of sixty-three poems by Harry Griswold. One of these poems was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. The book also contains four black-and-white reproductions of photos by the author, plus the cover photo. (Please see sidebar at right.)
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Cover designed by Kristin Johnson, redbat design.
Trade paperback, 80 pages
ISBN-10: 1-877655-55-4
ISBN-13: 978-1-877655-55-5
Release Date: 1 July 2007
Publisher: Wordcraft of Oregon, LLC
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Blurbs:
Harry Griswold’s aptly-titled debut collection of poems, Camera Obscura, is filled with people — real and imagined — at times isolated in their grief and locked in silence. The poet gives voice to their yearnings, and solace in his plain-spoken words. This is a poetry deeply focused in its seeing, its way of knowing. From the seemingly mundane to the near extraordinary, these poems look at the dailiness of our lives, as in the camera’s darkened chamber, “right in the middle of things.”
—Natasha Trethewey, author of Native Guard (Houghton Mifflin, 2006), winner of the 2007 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry
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You will see that Harry Griswold’s poems move deftly back and forth between his intimate, private world and the big wide world at large. From this constant interaction, all sorts of interesting ideas arise.
—Peter Sears, author of The Brink (Gibbs-Smith, 2000)
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Harry Griswold’s reality presses in from all sides. He speaks in a calm voice, quiet for the most part, but we sense the wildness just under the surface, pushing against the words.
—Joseph Millar, author of Fortune (Eastern Washington University Press, 2007)
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Harry Griswold’s poetry is filled with a multiplicity of voices, characters, and experiences, all offered with a quiet lyricism. There is a tenderness in his way of seeing the events of the world and the people who inhabit it. Whether his character is a young woman who reveals her sense of violation or a child overhearing his mother talking about someone else’s breast cancer, Harry Griswold’s poetry reveals a concern for the world in which we live, and he renders that concern with an observant eye and honest voice.
—Steve McDonald, author of Where There Was No Pattern (Finishing Line Press, 2007)
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Harry Griswold is the kind of poet you would like to sit down with. He’s weaving stories and he knows just how much to show, how much to tell. You won’t find a false step or easy theatrics. Camera Obscura is the work of an experienced, astute man, very worthwhile taking in. We need more wisdom in our poetry and Griswold delivers.
—Eloise Klein Healy, author of The Islands Project: Poems For Sappho (Red Hen Press, 2007)
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Harry Griswold’s Camera Obscura is a quiet collection filled with humorous and sometimes savage ironies and the quirks that only the best poets reveal: wisdom, insight, artistic integrity, an ability to stir:
“…cockles and swirls, damp
indentations, rising shafts
of lubricous energy, some grassy places
people still run their bare feet through.”
These poems are gripping. They do what brilliant poems should do — make you close your eyes and smile with understanding and gratitude.
—Duff Brenna, author of poetry collection, Waking in Wisconsin (Borealis Press, 1984), and six novels, including The Book of Mamie and The Law of Falling Bodies
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