Howard L. Terry wrote poetry after losing his hearing as a child and much of his sight as a young man. He farmed, worked in the postal service, organized Deaf writers, and kept returning to verse as a way of holding travel, family, California, Missouri, war, and memory together. Sung in Silence gathers poems written across decades, from Sherwood Forest and Keats’s grave to Mount Lowe, Lake Tahoe, Hollywood, home farms, children’s songs, ballads, and the long sequence “The Old Homestead.” Terry supplied an errata sheet, so this edition has an unusual advantage: it can follow the author’s own corrections. The poems are reset from the 1929 source, with the dramatic work that follows them left in the archival scan.
Terry, Howard L. A Voice from the Silence. Date unverified.
———. Waters from an Ozark Spring. Date unverified.
———. California, and Other Verse. Palisades Press, 1917.
———. Sung in Silence: Selected Poems. Privately printed, 1929.
Biographical entry in Who’s Who sources.
Gallaudet University. “Archival Holdings on Howard Leslie Terry.”
National Association of the Deaf. “Historical Records.”