Over the past twenty years, in additon to authoring his thirteen volumes of poetry, Henry Langhorne has
had his poems published in a number of local and regional periodicals: The Sewanee Review (Winter
2016), Hurricane Review, The Panhandler, Emerald Coast Review, Negative Capability,
Poem, The Cape Rock, The Chattahoochee Review, Plainsongs, Passager, Inlet,
Mediphors, Life on the Line (anthology), Dockside, On Wings of Spirit (anthology), The
Pharos, and the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA). He is currently a member of the Academy
of American Poets.
His boyhood home was in Uniontown, Alabama,
a small town in a stretch of rich, black earth known as the Black Belt, a part of the Canebrake, from which The Canebrake
Collection got its title. This fertile cotton land was near the Tombigbee River where tall stands of canebrake once grew.
Henry Langhorne attended undergraduate school at The University
of the South at Sewanee, Tennessee, followed by graduation from Tulane Medical School in 1957. He served his internship at
Charity Hospital in New Orleans, where he also obtained specialty training. Later, he became the oldest ever graduate student
at Sewanee when he earned his Master of Fine Ars (MFA) in Creative Writing in May of 2016.
Henry Langhorne retired in December of 2014 as the senior member of Cardiology Consultants, after
practicing cardiology in Pensacola, Florida, since 1963.
FOLLOWING ARE BOOK TITLES, PUBLICATION DATES, AND SAMPLE POEMS:
Other samples will be added as soon as possible
From Light Is Life (2017):
From In Search of Solitude (2015):
From The Canebrake Collection
(2013)
Sweater Weather
Walking my route this November at sunset
I stop and look at the evening sky--
orange, red, pink, yellow, gray,
all at once and everywhere in this moment
at the winding down of my life.
It's sweather weather for me,
but not for a teenage boy in short sleeves,
skiing down the hill on a skateboard.
I wave and yield the road to him.
It's time to say a prayer of gratitude
for just being here, alive in this life,
in this evening, under this sky.
From The Lay
of the Land (2011)
Eating Oysters at the Beach
We lean on the wet newspapers
and
touch the split shells,
feel their raw, cold wetness,
while the ocean quietly lays
its salt down beyond the windows
and
rain falls like pitchforks.
I hope the room leading into death
has lamps like these on the table,
so that our farewell to everything
will have the ease and last as long
as ordering another beer
to wait out the rain.
Pensacola Beach, circa 1982
From In the Country of Rain (2009)
From As Fate Would Have It (2007)
From The Clarity of Last Things (2005)
From Winter Clothes (2003)
From Listen to the River (2001)
* Although Listen to the River is out of print, some
selections from the volume are included
in The Clarity of Last Things.
From Tombigbee (1999):
4 West
I'm tired of walking down this hall
to meet their wives for the last time.
Sometimes I stop and plan my words
as if they were born today.
Looking out of a window at clouds
prompts me to search for softer words.
Time
runs out, nurses and chaplain
linger
in the doorway to hear
if I've found a different way
to say he's dead.
