Garden of the Fugitives: Poems

by Ashley Mace Havird

An Ivorybill in Arkansas, which human guilt has conjured up from extinction; mud daubers toting “stunned spiders” to their nests on a screened porch in Louisiana; a whale shark off the Yucatan whose spots tell its story in indecipherable Braille; conchs harvested from an undersea garden in the Caymans; stray dogs in Athens, ancient gods in disguise―the lives of these creatures and others entwine with ours in The Garden of the Fugitives .

Loosely based on the story of Eve, this collection of poems takes the reader from Eden into a fallen world.  Exploring the tense relationships between women and men, mothers and daughters, and human beings and other species, these poems lead to Pompeii’s memorial to the “ash people” in The Garden of the Fugitives , where parents and children, inside their husks of plaster, never stop dying to the singing of bees.

WISTERIA
Oozing perfume,
the vine kills exquisitely
in such high style.

The trees have no idea
what’s happening to them.

80 pages, Paperback

First published September 15, 2014

About the author

ASHLEY MACE HAVIRD is a poet and novelist who grew up on a tobacco farm in South Carolina. Her debut novel, Lightningstruck, won the 2015 Ferrol Sams Award for Fiction and was published by Mercer University Press in September 2016. She has published three collections of poems: The Garden of the Fugitives (Texas Review Press, 2014), which won the 2013 X. J. Kennedy Prize, Sleeping with Animals (Yellow Flag Press, 2014) and Dirt Eaters (Stepping Stones Press,2009),which won the 2008 South Carolina Poetry Initiative Prize. Her poems and short stories have appeared in many journals including Shenandoah, The Southern Review, and The Virginia Quarterly Review, and in anthologies such as The Southern Poetry Anthology, IV: Louisiana and Hard Lines: Rough South Poetry. A recipient of a Louisiana Division of the Arts Fellowship in Literature, she lives in Shreveport, Louisiana, with her husband, the poet David Havird, and their own best dog in the world.

Reviews

[Sara May · Rating 4 out of 5]

Beautifully haunting. Havird has an exquisite way of capturing mournful moments and locations alongside the stark and powerful beauty of the South, the Caribbean and historical ruins of note (Pompeii, Athens). I felt as if I have followed her around the world.

I love poetry for before bed and while taking baths, as the cadence of poems is easy to consume 2-3 and come back to them the next time. It was always easy to come back to this collection and be transported.

[Carlos · Rating 5 out of 5]

A great book by one of Louisiana's finest poets.  It is a journey not just through Havird's life, but through the lives of various cultures and ages—from Pompeii to the Cayman Islands to the tobacco farms of South Carolina.

[Janice · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was okay. This had some good imagery and emotions that you could relate to. Gave you a look back at a life well lived.