A NEW YORK TIMES BEST POETRY BOOK OF 2018

A transfiguration of Mennonite hymns into heartbreaking lyric poems, Years, Months, and Days is a moving meditation on the possibility of translation. Bridging secular spirituality and holy reverence with the commonalities of life, death, love, and hope, Luke Hathaway explores the connection between hymn and poem. The sparse and tender phrasing of Years, Months, and Days is an offering of words to music, made in the spirit of a shared love—for life, for a particular landscape and its rhythms—that animates poem and prayer alike.

Luke Hathaway has been before now at some time boy and girl, bush, bird, and a mute fish in the sea. All the Daylight Hours is one of three books of poetry he published under his former name, Amanda Jernigan. His third book, Years, Months, and Days, was named a best book of 2018 in The New York Times. Luke teaches English and Creative Writing at Saint Mary’s University in K'jipuktuk/Halifax. He sometimes writes words for music and for the stage.

Luke Hathaway's profile page

Praise for Years, Months, and Days

"Elegant, spare, and quiet, and, like the hymns these poems transfigure, like a prayer set to music."

—Casey Plett, author of On Community and Little Fish

"Vespers. Devotional. Breathtakingly sparse. Elegant. Wondrous. Moving. Rare."

—Kirby, author of Poetry Is Queer

"[Years, Months, and Days] is carried by [Hathaway's] obvious respect for [his] sponsoring material and by [his] superb ear."

—New York Times

"Exquisite . . . deeply resonant . . . . There’s often a metaphysical cast to his forthright observations, which makes them both evocative and poignant."

—Toronto Star

"[Luke Hathaway's] small and beautiful book should be on your bedside table even if it is as heaped as mine. Just 4” by 5” and fewer than 70 pages, the book consists of untitled, spare, and simply-worded poems which evoke the cycles of life, the seasons, and human longing for meaning and connection. The poems expand in your head, opening your mind to matters beyond the day-to-day."

—Arc Poetry Magazine

"The poems are tiny, seeds only, bare of flourish, each containing the germ of an idea so large the mind can hardly hold it . . . . If you seek to tune those numbered days of yours to what is most frightfully vital, you might carry this book in your satchel awhile. It’s tiny enough to conceal in a large pocket, but it thunders, and its seeds carry fields."

—Image

"Singular . . . stirring . . . invites pauses and contemplation. It is [Hathaway's] keen sense of what is essential that guides . . . these meditations."

—Hamilton Review of Books

"An elegant little book . . . [Hathaway] crafts pithy yet piercing poems that echo in the mind."

—Canadian Literature