Praise for Humphrey’s Poetry:

“The power of Jim Humphrey's writing, always, bears exceptional witness and testament and makes a very dear pact with what it's all about. Jim's poetry tells it best it can be, ever.” -Robert Creeley (1926-2005)


“Humphrey's poems—believe them; he’s lived them. He knows that pain and suffering bloom like eternal flowers. He knows that trying is the one thing we have left.” -Charles Bukowski (1920-1994)


“The gratia victrix of Augustine. The truth, grace given the world and ourselves, barely makes it. An implication for the writings of James Humphrey; testimony to the edgy victory of grace. Love, despite all, is primary, a heal-all. His works pluck the flower and offer it. A moralist of imagination. Redeeming the language. His poetry, a lexicon of the heart's ecology. A work, a life that raises going counter to a sacrament.” -Daniel Berrigan, S.J.

“In his best poems, James Humphrey takes such risks and dares such simplicity that as nearly as possible he succeeds in saying the unsayable. It would be foolish and riduculous to call his work sentimental. What it says is attained by crashing into raw feeling head on, and somehow coming out the other side. It doesn't always work, but when it does it can raise the hair.” –Andrew Glaze


“I think Humphrey’s stuff is getting it, getting the idea, getting to the idea—that living is the first poem, and getting that understood in simple true words is the second.” –William Saroyan (for Argument For Love, 1970)


“NAKED: POEMS SELECTED AND NEW, 1969-2006, is certainly apt and revealing—the perfect title. This is an excellent body of poems unified by a sustained and consistent voice, along with the enduring and compelling memory of early ruthless experiences. It takes much courage to introduce a collection with Walt Whitman’s (1812-1892) BOLD "Modesty" brilliancy, but James Humphrey lives up to the challenge he has set to tell what his heart feels and knows ‘Loud and Clear!’

“I admire particularly his risk-taking in the honesty of his responses to personal disappointments and set backs, as exemplified by that in his tributes and eulogies ‘In Dark Times’ of the NEW POEMS are so wrenching, whether for Creeley or Lennon or Joplin. Humphrey’s ever-fresh energy connects with the reader from the start of every poem. That immediacy is remarkable! He nods toward the argument in those fine titles, ‘Take a Long Hard Last Look at Me: The final Day of My Life;’ (Humphrey wrote this in 30 consecutive hours without interruption!) ‘An Unbelievable Encounter While Walking Alone / On My 67th Birthday, February 20th, 2006,’ Such solid grace he demonstrates in this poem: prevailing over his true destiny that was beaten out of him.

“I hold high approval of his great skill and restraint and wisdom in ‘Few Learn This,’ where he is honoring Creeley’s life and spirit with generous passion. The last lines are beautifully worked. Only nature (in the tree rings) can properly celebrate his life and voice.

“As James says in ‘Possible to be Sixteen Again?’, given a life other than the sorrowful existence he survived, it’s very possible that he might never have become a poet. Maybe. Privately, I suspect poetry would have found him, although his subject matter would certainly have been quite different.

“Whatever we've been given, we somehow have to use, and throughout this selection, Humphrey’s use is triumphant!” -Nancy Sullivan, Poetry Professor Brown University, Rhode Island College, retired.


“Humphrey’s is the kind of poetry that means something, is so genuinely wrested from life that it hurts to read.” -Fred Chappell