Gary Hanna debuts "The Homestead Poems"

The Historic Peter Marsh House on the Rehoboth Art League campus is 270 years old this year.

Local author Gary Hanna's new book "The Homestead Poems," published by The Broadkill Press, contains poems about the house itself, pieces of furniture, the gardens, flowers, animals who live there, Rehoboth Art League activities, nearby places in Dewey, Lewes, Cape Henlopen State Park, the beaches, and even area staples like crop dusters and farmers chasing geese from their fields.

"These poems look through the lens of history - both personal and collective - by means of immediate details of the present," said former Delaware Poet Laureate Fleda Brown. "The love for the exact charms me: the objects, seasons, beaches, towers, screen doors, birds, crabs and flowers. It is the unseen, though, that finally holds me, the backdrop of the lonely human mind, the individual longing, both for the past and for what we wish and hope to understand and be in the present. These poems are lovers of life. They are a pleasure to read."

Hanna has received two fellowships in poetry and five individual artist awards from the Delaware Division of the Arts, and also received a residency fellowship to the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts from the Mid-Atlantic Arts Foundation. He is on the editorial board of the Broadkill Review and manages the Writers Library in Delaware. Copies are available from the Rehoboth Art League, The Broadkill Press and through the author.