Larks

Poems

Han VanderHart

• Publisher: Ohio University Press
• Year: 2025
• eBook ISBN: 9780821425923
• Edition: 0
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Poetry
• Index: Literature

The core of Larks is rural and mythic and true, existential and domestic, tender while full of sharp grief and documentation. Circling genealogies of silence and harm in a southern family, Larks centers on the relationship and memories of three sisters and Ovid’s telling of Philomel. In a landscape inhabited as much by farm animals (cows, goats, chickens, and barn kittens) as by the family, the lyric poem parses and articulates the self’s history—from the experience of a sister’s home birth to the traumatic erasure (and recovery) of the speaker’s memory. A work of poetic memoir, Larks asks if poetry can hold the heaviest truths we carry. The answer is a resounding yes.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Epigraph
• Contents
• Invocation
• When I Was My Grandfather’s Father
• The Body Is Water and the Water Has Origins
• Artist’s Statement in a Mountain Cabin
• Animal Boundaries
• Isabel
• Broken
• For the Barn Kittens
• Partial List of Hauntings
• Brief Catalog of Blue
• If Childhood Were according to Berries and Flowers
• Why the Names of Flowers
• Even Pines Have Crowns
• Poem with Split-Level Home and Pleasure
• “How people tell time is an intimate and local fact about them.” Anne Carson
• Poem with Photography, Pines, and a Biblical Queen
• The Grammar of Habit
• Burr Crown
• “Virginia seemed like always night.” David Lynch
• Excuses and Waivers
• My Mother’s Brown Plaid Drapes
• Larks, Four Variations
• After Reading James Baldwin’s Go Tell It on the Mountain
• I Can’t Let My Mind Go to the Thicket
• “I lean my grief / on two or three pines / and walk away.” Li Po
• There Is a Garment Called a Fatigue
• 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
• Ballast
• Without Chickens
• My Mother Says, “But This Is Your Sister’s Story”
• Larks
• Poem with Possession and Plastic Barrettes
• “We usually only recognized our kin when they appeared from behind a large bush out in the field”
• “A picture gradually appears, even with a hole in the middle.” Agnès Varda
• Poem with Trauma, Winter, and Pandemic
• Self-Portrait as Dreadnought
• As If
• I Go into the Wyeth Painting above the Psychologist’s Left Shoulder
• Carry Your Millstone Softly
• “Today is the day it will all be cleared”
• The Lily Crucifix (ca. 1450)
• The Girl with One Hand
• Swallows
• Love as a Succession of Absences
• “It is better to say ‘I am suffering’ than ‘this landscape is ugly.’” Simone Weil
• Birdsong Sounds Out of Tune Only to the Human Ear
• Our Hands
• Notes
• Acknowledgments