MORAL TALES, poetry by H. L. Hix

Publication Date: January 15, 2024

Paperback, 154 pages

ISBN: 978-1-956782-56-1

$24.50 retail, $18.50 from publisher

Plato may have pestered poets out of his republic, but he peppered his dialogues plenty with poetry of his own: the mind as an aviary, the soul as contrary horses chafing their charioteer. Marie de France might be more famed for her Lais, but she could fetch a pretty funny fable. In Moral Tales, H. L. Hix first treats (not “translates,” quite) and then glosses a suite of each: flighty passages from Plato, earthy fables from Marie. Which makes the moral tales here tales you’ve heard before, but not the way you’ve heard them.

Praise for H. L. Hix & Moral Tales

Across “the disruptions of time and distance,” the poet Eavan Boland wrote, writers necessarily “imagine one another,” construct a conversation that spans centuries and continents, to forge unlikely “fires of rapport.” H. L. Hix’s Moral Tales does just this, enacting a lyric engagement with the passages of Plato and the tales of Marie de France that traverses oceans, theologies and languages, to deliver an ancient Greek philosopher into the back seat of an SUV and the realm of the “selfie,” and a shadowy twelfth century poet into a world of Deadheads, tabloids, and colonoscopies, the nature of the soul more urgent there than it has perhaps ever been. A witty quarrel, a conversation, and a profound devotion, this book is both fabular and timely, and I was utterly transported by its music and its thinking.

— Molly McCully Brown, author of Places I’ve Taken My Body

Where do we seek poetry? How do we know when we have found it? Or, is the finding at once poetry’s making? In Moral Tales, H. L. Hix lets translation take place as this finding, this pursuit towards a making, a poetry of “invitation to broader vistas.” Contours within contours, a phantom source haunts the text, joining both parts, “Myths” and “Fables.” In relief, the ancient and legendary Aesop rustles the pages of Hix’s latest project, gusting from the dove-haunted courtyard of Plato’s Academy past the city walls of an Athens in decline to the ravenous late-twelfth century Anglo-Norman courts of Henry II. Of course, the ancient phantom also gathers the contemporary American situation into its dusk-hued folds, voicing a chilling echo throughout the many-channeled strife of our own age: “This, not peace, pervades out nation: I’ll see your lie and raise you one.” Moral Tales folds, unfolds, and refolds a soundscape dense and complex—a “complexity not composed of simples”—out of a language at once supple (rhymes like “yoga” with “show the”) and brittle (“goods” and “woods”), formal (“if the written is true / it conjoins true belief and sound rationale”) and colloquial (“I’m not gonna pass up this chance”). Tirelessly gesturing and evoking, Hix presses subtlety into subtlety, as in the glance to Melville’s magnum opus “call me / Glasswing” and the quieter glance, in the same poem, to Melville’s comment on that great work (“I commend it ad nihilo”). Take time with Moral Tales, read it variously—skimming from each title to the next letting poems arise among them, jibing from “Myth” to “Fable” to listen for responsion across the book’s parts, scudding from cover to cover over the collection’s diverse rhythms—and with patience, because “a little wonder will win plunder from this tale.”

— D. M. Spitzer, author of A Heaven Wrought of Iron

About the Author

H. L. Hix’s previous Broadstone Book is The Gospel, an edition and translation that merges canonical with noncanonical ancient sources in a single narrative, and refers to God and Jesus without assigning them gender. His other recent books include a novel, The Death of H. L. Hix; a poetry collection, Bored In Arcane Cursive Under Lodgepole Bark; an edition, with Julie Kane, of selected poems by contemporary Lithuanian poet Tautvyda Marcinkevičiūtė, called Terribly In Love; an essay collection, Demonstrategy; and a hybrid work, Say It Into My Mouth. His poetry collection Constellation received the 2023 Vern Rutsala Book Prize. He professes philosophy and creative writing at a university in “one of those square states.”