“This precious retrieval of Scott Harney’s voice, like a miraculous liquefaction, brings back what might have been lost; a litany of heartbreak and clear-eyed compassion; perfect words fashioned out of writerly integrity and poetry’s dogged refusal to die.”
The Blood of San Gennaro
by Scott Harney
Having kept his poetry largely to himself for forty years, Scott Harney on his death left behind an astonishing trove of richly imagined and exquisitely sculpted poems, collected here for the first time. One of Robert Lowell’s last students, Harney went on to develop a voice which sings steady and true, rendering unforgettable images from the streets of his youth in Charlestown, MA, to the intimate scenes in his adopted city of Naples, with wisdom and humor. The people and places in these poems feel so close you could reach out and touch them. Edited and introduced by Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer Megan Marshall (Harney’s Harvard classmate and partner), The Blood of San Gennaro will leave you wondering how such layered and echoing poems remained hidden for so long.
Scott Harney
Scott Harney (1955-2019) was a practicing poet who, aside from a few early publications in the Somerville Community News, did not publish during his lifetime, leaving a significant body of work to be discovered by readers after his death. He grew up in and around Boston, graduating from Charlestown High School and Harvard College. His literary influences include Robert Lowell and Jane Shore, with whom he studied at Harvard in the 1970s, as well as Richard Hugo and Philip Levine.
