In Search of Solitude

In his latest volume of poetry, In Search of Solitude, Henry Langhorne once again offers his readers what they have grown to expect. Under intriguing titles such as “Life Is Such a Small Place,” “Her Preserves,” and “The Sixty-Year-Old Kiss,” he provides one lyrical line after another that provokes thought; elicits emotions of love, fear, regret, and thanksgiving; and offers more than an occasional surprise for the heart and mind.

In his latest volume of poetry, In Search of Solitude, Henry Langhorne once again offers his readers what they have grown to expect. Under intriguing titles such as “Life Is Such a Small Place,” “Her Preserves,” and “The Sixty-Year-Old Kiss,” he provides one lyrical line after another that provokes thought; elicits emotions of love, fear, regret, and thanksgiving; and offers more than an occasional surprise for the heart and mind. Known for his “doctor poems” and for his melancholy perspective on life’s events, Henry Langhorne continues both themes in this new book, sometimes in the same poem. An example is the last stanza of “4 West at the End of the Hall,” a poem about a doctor who spends a few last minutes with a patient: It all took place on 4 West at the end of the hall. I would sit, holding a hand slowly cooling. That was all.

In Search of Solitude is the latest from Henry Langhorne, former Poet Laureate of Northwest Florida (1999-2009). He is the author of eight previous collections of poetry: Tombigbee (1999), Listen to the River (2001), Winter Clothes (2003), The Clarity of Last Things (2005), As Fate Would Have It (2007), In the Country of Rain (2009), The Lay of the Land (2011), and The Canebrake Collection (2013). Henry Langhorne’s boyhood home was in Uniontown, Alabama, a small town in a stretch of rich, black earth known as the Black Belt, a part of the Canebrake from which his book, The Canebrake Collection, gets its title. This fertile cotton land was near the Tombigbee River where tall stands of canebrake once grew. Henry Langhorne graduated from The University of the South at Sewanee, Tennessee, and attended Tulane Medical School. His post graduate training was obtained at Charity Hospital in New Orleans. He retired in December of 2014 as the senior member of Cardiology Consultants, after practicing cardiology in Pensacola, Florida, since 1963. For over twenty years, his poems have been published in a number of local and regional periodicals, including: The Sewanee Review, Hurricane Review, The Panhandler, Emerald Coast Review, Negative Capability, Poem, The Cape Rock, The Chattahoochee Review, Plainsongs, Passager, Inlet, Mediphors, Life on the Line (anthology), Dockside, On Wings of Spirit (anthology), The Pharos, and the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA). He is currently a member of the Academy of American Poets.