Henry Robert Hau
ABOUT THE POET
Henry Robert Hau was born in Manhattan and raised on Long Island and in the suburbs of Southern California. His father, a commercial artist and landscape painter, helped cultivate his son’s interests in the arts and nature early in life.
Hau has written, “As a child, my early years on Long Island were rife with poetical lore – fishing trips to Babylon, Montauk Point, and Oyster Bay … picnics at Teddy Roosevelt’s summer home on Sagamore Hill and excursions to New York City’s wondrous Hayden Planetarium, Central Park, the American Museum of Natural History that Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia called the great ‘dead zoo,’ and Macy’s department store, where my father designed and dressed the big window displays.”
From ages five to eleven, the young poet went alone on bird-sketching trips several miles from home in the woods of Bethpage: “The world was safer then – John James Audubon’s Birds of America was my guide.” His father also introduced him to the films of the Korda brothers, including The Four Feathers, Jungle Book, and The Thief of Bagdad. “These films are still relevant, moral and magical,” he says. “Watch them with your children.”
“My heroes were naturalists like Audubon and Ivan T. Sanderson, who embarked upon zoological expeditions. There were also the stories of circus animal trainer Clyde Beatty and the adventure treks of John Muir. I also read a lot of Jack London, as well as almost everything John Steinbeck wrote.”
Recalling the high school daze of southern California as “hot, vapid, and cliquish,” Hau left for studies in English literature and philosophy at the University of Oregon. While there, he took up fly-fishing on the Blue and Rogue rivers.
Following university, Hau lived in Lake Tahoe and Anchorage and is now a long-time resident of Toronto. He taught Transcendental Meditation for 20 years in Canada and the United States. A graduate of the Canadian School of Eastern Medicine, Hau leads workshops on Ayurveda and the Poetry of Sacred Self. Hau is the author of For the Bird Sings, a book of poetry.
PUBLISHED IN THIS ENDURING GIFT
A Still Point of the Turning World
The River Stone
Blue Heron
The House Sparrow
Beauty Hard to Believe
To the River Is a Place I Go
The Egrets
