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.
"Larks heeds the calls of the world-whether that beckoning sounds like bird chatter, orchestral music on the radio, or voices around the dinner table. As the book unfolds, it disrupts the integrity of childhood memory filled with the song and sights of natural wonder, in order to let family silences begin to speak. The present blurs necessitating a reconsideration of the past, mythos, and family.
Chanda Feldman, Hollis Summers Poetry Prize final judge and author of Approaching the Fiel
"I warn you-Han VanderHart's Larks is a book of frightening beauty. Clusters of gorgeous images may ripen like dewberries there, trumpet vine and yellow jessamine may climb among its deft, balanced lines, but violence seethes among the wildflowers and loblolly pines. The ghosts of occult, unremembered memories haunt the pastures and barn, the house and the upstairs bedrooms. The poems may be set i
Jennifer Atkinson, professor emerita, George Mason University
