Larks, Han VanderHart
Ohio University Press, 2025
I have long loved the songs of Appalachia and the labor songs of coal country, and one thing I love about them is that you can get a sense for the particulars of the peoples’ lives: what they wore, what they ate, what they were named.
Home, home, home.
I can almost smell the honeysuckle vines.
-Hazel Dickens
Larks is a book with a tragic narrative at its heart: an incestuous sexual assault. And yet, VanderHart begins with a slow look at the world around them and how that world—and they—came to be.
There were guineas
in the pecan trees,
on the roof.
Crawfish in the creek.
-“When I Was My Grandfather's Father”
I can trace my
sisters and I back to Nathaniel Starbuck and Mary Coffin
standing together
in the Nantucket rain
having left the
rain in England
-“The Body is Water and the Water Has
Origins”
This world is not without flaw and not without foreshadowing. There is anger in the home, the clash of poverty and ambition, the clash of religion and learning, the short lives of various animals… But there is a love for the world, too, and for the people in it, evident in the language of the poems. And this is one of the beauties of what VanderHart does. They talk of sins without giving up the love. They say, “I want an otherworldly ex- / planation for unkindness which // is the milk of this world,” (from “Larks”) but they speak of this world with ordinary words:
I grew up shopping
in Walmart’s
faded glory
my mother rescued
bread
designated for
pigs
our milk was
unpasteurized
the cream rose to
the top overnight
my mother once had
me grate a grape nut loaf
through a screen
for breakfast cereal
-“Artist’s Statement in a Mountain Cabin
When the narrative turns to the sin at its
heart, we might expect a spiraling down and inward, a collapse into trauma and
pain, a smallness. Instead—and this I think is remarkable about VanderHart’s
book—as we learn more about the wrongdoing and its aftermath, the world gets
bigger around us. Keats, David Lynch, Milton, Dante, Don MacLean—all make
appearances.
The pines the speaker and their sister both see outside their house recall the pines Li Po leaned his grief on. The Lily Crucifix on the Isle of Wight becomes an image to hold the intergenerational suffering.
One of the mysteries of grief is that life
goes on. A mystery of memory is that it goes missing, and that it comes back.
VanderHart preserves much of the mystery even as the narrative becomes clearer.
The mystery isn’t what happened; it is how such pain can sit among such beauty.
VanderHart quotes Simone Weil to say, “It is better to say, ‘I am suffering’
than, ‘this landscape
is ugly.’” In their own words, they say,
though I will not
keep chickens
that I might love
the hawks
-“Without Chickens”
Larks is also a book of poems, discrete and with each its own shape. One of my favorites is "When My Grandmother Barbara Jean Was Dying, My Mother Sat on Her Bed and Played 'House of the Rising Sun' on Her Guitar Because It Was the Only Song She Knew," which still manages to be worth reading after getting through the title. Another favorite, “Carry Your Millstone Softly,” is one of the shortest poems but certainly the sharpest.
VanderHart has written a book of poems that each play its part in holding one central subject up to the light—but also a book full of poems that stand each on their own, each carrying its own light. The fourteen page poem at the center of the book, which shares the book’s title, serves to gather in the separate lights. And what is illumined is worth spending some time contemplating.
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J-T Kelly is an innkeeper in Indianapolis. He lives in a brick house with his wife, their six children, his two parents, and a dog. Debut poetry chapbook Like Now (CCCP/Subpress, 2023). Poems in The Denver Quarterly, Bad Lilies, and elsewhere.
