Edward Wright Haile

Edward Wright Haile is a poet, historian, cartographer, translator, musician (flute), carpenter, sailor, and land surveyor. As author and editor he has produced Jamestown Narratives, the definitive collection of firsthand accounts of England’s colony in the first decade, as well as two historical maps: Virginia Discovered and Discribed and England in America; and three books of poetry, the latest being the Jamestown “epic” Where None Before Hath Stood. His translation of the Oresteia of Aeschylus was pronounced “a work of energy and genius” by Ladislaus Bolchazy of The Classical Bulletin. A native Virginian born in Washington, D.C. in 1943, Ed was graduated a bachelor of music from The Catholic University in 1975. He lives with his wife Bess in Essex County, Virginia, and has two sons.

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Books

Virginia Leaf: Ballads, Odes, Lyrics, Stanzas & Lines in Three Books

$16.95

by Edward Wright Haile

The poet's foreword says he began all this on one fine day. It must have been finer than morning in an adjacent state by the looks of the result. What a sweep! What a breadth! What a memory! Who's left out here? Nobody I know. Virginia is 475 miles long but averages half that, which means here we have about one page per mile of her right across.

THE POLECAT PRIZE

RAN OFF ALL OTHERS

Some versifier came and sowed

many a thunderation ode.

This got the Golden Polecat Prize,

the one that draws the market flies,

awarding a chief excellence

that chases all the others hence; 

puts to shame and in the shade

the Armadillo Accolade,

and that eternal charnel foist

so-called the yearly critics' choist.

It strands our thunderation moot

what's really worth a second hoot.

For some 'twill always be roast beef,

but, after that, Virginia leaf.

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