Noctuary

Accents Publishing is proud to present Noctuary by Dave Harrity, a collection written from the unsettled territory of marriage, separation, parenthood, faith, and loss. Its poems move through houses and city streets, churches and bedrooms, gardens and beaches, following a speaker who cannot stop looking at what has happened and asking what, if anything, can be understood from it. Memory keeps changing under that scrutiny. A marriage can be a home and a wound. Faith can survive after belief has altered. Love can remain after the life built around it has come apart. 

The title gives us a way into the collection: a noctuary is a record of the night. Harrity's night is literal-there is sleepwalking, insomnia, wandering, darkness giving way to morning-but it is also the long period in which the familiar loses its shape. The poems follow that disorientation without rushing to make sense of it. Harrity notices what is at hand: dead leaves caught in a door, ice on a puddle, a child asleep against a parent's body, vegetables from a garden, a mouse trapped inside a wall, shells brought home from the sea. The ordinary world keeps going while the speaker tries to find his place in it. 

What gives Noctuary its force is Harrity's willingness to leave some questions unanswered. What do we owe the people we have loved? What happens to faith when its old language no longer holds? How do we look back without rewriting the past to suit the ending? And how does a person begin another life while carrying the evidence of the first?