Brett Rutherford: The Pumpkined Heart

Now available for ebook PDF download, here is a facsimile of Brett Rutherford's 1973 chapbook, The Pumpkined Heart, his first outpouring of neo-Romantic lyric poems, inspired by the natural surroundings of a village in Northwest Pennsylvania where the poet attended college intermittently. This collection, with intense black-and-white photography by David Murphy, captures the history and pre-history of a glacial lake, its Native American dwellers, and its pioneer settlers. The poet's long cycle of autumn poems, Anniversarius, commences here, and the two "Water Music" poems convey a sense of union with the elements and raw, inhuman nature, a subsuming of the human into the cosmos. While most of these poems have been revised, or are being revised for the forthcoming book, The Pumpkined Heart: Pennsylvania Poems, this chapbook has its own integrity and marks this writer's first mature poems. The first edition was limited to 500 copies, printed by the author at The Poet's Press loft in Manhattan. Scarce copies are offered for outrageous prices by dealers on the Internet, so here is the book for those who want to own it for less than the cost of an iced tea.