POETRY BY BYRON HOOT
Hover over a book below for a description or excerpt.

Poems of the Mad Hunter
Fear I fear my grandchildren are beyond the redemption of the hunt. Which worries me. They may never know the primal truths that hone a soul to be a person – hard enough but more so when removed from trees and hills and stream, learning game, reading sign. All necessary to being better today than yesterday. Lessons that can be taken in. I hunt and fish religiously. In ways sacred, where knowing and honoring and deciding in a split-second matter as the metaphysical realities they are. Metaphors full of meaning the wilds give what no cities can. I worry what kind of stories my grandchildren will tell sitting around a fire.

Such Beautiful Sense
Such Beautiful Sense is a collection of poems written from the same perspective. My kitchen table and the glass door […]

Monster in the Kingdom
Monster in the Kingdom: Fragments from the Grendel Manuscript is my interpretation of Beowulf and John Gardner’s Grendel. Fragments because […]

Poems From the Woods
Poems From the Wood came about, still come about, during hunting season. Which begins, for me, mid-September through nearly the […]

In Our Time
This is an attempt at a flash chapbook of poetry. These poems were written between April 4, 2020 and April […]

Observations from a Detached Retina Standing on an Artificial Knee
Observations from Detached Retina Eyes are primarily poems of the road. I have, for some time, kept a notebook in […]

The Art of Grilling
The Art of Grilling, Religious Reflections was written over a series of weeks while grilling dinner. The grill was under […]

Piercing the Veil
Throughout this invaluable collection, Clary’s photos and Hoot’s poems accomplish that rare and lucky phenomenon of artistic collaboration, their independent muses somehow tapping into a mutual recognition, inspired by the same sources, offering us multi-faceted ways of experiencing these real places, like Sligo, PA and Jackson County, West Virginia, and revealing their hidden spirits.

LATEST POSTS
That Fullness
“We – suddenly, like sometimes the moon, are full” because we know the promise of fallen leaves, the winter grass […]
Consolation
I am under the shadow of death. The shadow my friend has cast by his own death too soon visited […]
Not Like Any Other
It is Sunday morning. I am driving from The Laurel Highlands through Ligonier through Derry through Blairsville past Homer City […]
Once Again
The rain and wind have visited the trees once too often — the branches nearly bare. The ground covered in […]
Contact Me
hootbyron@gmail.com