Selected Poems (Hayes)

These are the poems of Donald Jeffery Hayes, a North Carolina poet writing in the closing years of the 1920s. Collected here are verses composed during a brief but fertile period of American poetry, when modernists were shattering old forms elsewhere, but in the American South, a quieter revolution was underway in language and perception. Hayes writes with the particular attention of someone who knows his landscape intimately, the humid summers and red clay of his home region, the way light falls through Carolina pines. These are not loud poems. They are carefully made, meditative, grounded in sensory detail and the rhythms of ordinary life. There is an economy to them that suggests a poet who understood that the smallest observations often carry the most weight. For readers who value early 20th century American poetry in its quieter registers, who want to hear voices that did not shout but spoke plainly about beauty and loss and the passing of time, these selections offer a window into a vanished moment in American letters.