American Yard, Poems by Dolores Hayden

Dolores Hayden’s American Yard is a large yard indeed: broad enough to contain poems of wide historical and cultural reference, deep enough to contain ground’s-eye views of the world of children and their discoveries, interior enough to distill emotion to delicate shades, and exterior enough to wrap everything in a casually elegant formal music. Hayden has crafted a rich, sophisticated first collection of poems.

Sample Poems by Dolores Hayden

Dolores Hayden's website

"The dense verbal texture of Dolores Hayden’s poems pulls against their geographical and historical sweep. Lush with sensuous detail, American Yard is also ambitious and expansive; Hayden maps matters large and small with elegance and authority."—Rachel Hadas

"Dolores Hayden writes beautifully-made poems that are both erudite and wise. American Yard is an auspicious, full-throated debut."—Elizabeth Alexander

"Dolores Hayden infuses formalism with spiky wit and colloquial charm in poems that show us America from Maine to California, from Teddy Roosevelt’s childhood to that of her own delightful, ever-so-modern daughter. She gives us a land of motorcycles, flea markets, old houses in new siding, and gardens that still speak the old victorian 'language of flowers'—but most of all she gives us the America within ourselves, a place of violence and drift but also—still!—sweetness and beauty."—Katha Pollitt

Dolores Hayden’s poems have appeared in The Kenyon Review, The Yale Review, Southwest Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Slate, and many other journals and anthologies. She has won the Poetry Society of America’s The Writer Magazine/Emily Dickinson Award. A former Guggenheim and N.E.A. fellow, she is also the author of several award-winning books about American urban landscapes. Her most recent is A Field Guide to Sprawl (W.W. Norton, 2004). She is a professor of architecture and American studies at Yale.

ISBN 1932339418, 140 pages

Order from Barnes and Noble

Order from Powells

Order from Amazon