Larks by
Han VanderHart
A lark is light-boned and delicate. It sings elaborate songs while on the wing. And it is the perfect emblem for Han VanderHart’s superb second collection of poetry, Larks. In poem after poem, VanderHart expresses their vulnerability, singing delicate verses while flying away from a painful childhood. The poet transforms suffering and its traumatic aftermath into poems of feathery lightness and soaring emotion.
I found it remarkable that Larks has such an ethereal way with such heavy subject matter. I found it therapeutic, too, recalling how sun and sky and birdsong lifted the burdens of my own excruciating childhood. Larks is not a book I needed to ponder or analyze. I felt it in my soul, immediately, intimately. I hope—with some confidence—that other readers will feel this as well, because no one makes it to adulthood completely unscathed.
VanderHart opens their book with “Invocation,” a poem that establishes the song of the poet as one of emotion and sensation, rather than knowledge. In other words, as reading begins, it is time to feel rather than grasp for an answer:
I do not know whether it is morning or mourning,
the name of the doves calling in the hems of day…
almost every day I say to someone: “it is not important”
but the wing of it the beak the onyx eye
is that I do not know this either
What the poet may be mourning, or what may be dawning in the poet’s consciousness, is their legacy. The first several poems of Larks trace ancestry in images: a grandfather’s blue easy-chair; the ancient New Englanders in the family line; and the landmarks of an upbringing in a rural part of America’s’ Mid-Atlantic—Walmart, electric fences, and hurricane Isabel, which devastated the region.
Yet ancestors and topography are not the whole story, and VanderHart soon digs down to find poverty and struggle, the pain of animals and people , of broken wooden spoons, a rip in the screen door, an injured dog or kitten. The memories of events, their flow, their colors, their sounds, begin to unite in the poetry with VanderHart’s developing fascination with words. For instance, in “Why the Names of Flowers,” the young poet learns the name of the flower “Black-eyed Susan.” The poem goes on to reflect on how the absence of a name—the silence—is a ringing bell. As the poem continues, the silences of the family, the words that cannot be said and must be hidden, are bells “that ring and ring and ring.”
Then, comes a dark note, “We are a house of bells, but the largest bell is buried in the lake.” Such a movement to the sinister is feature of the poetry in this section of the book. The poems voice a growing unease, something ominous lurking beneath images of daily life, beneath the tall pine and the ironing board. The flow of the poems creates a crescendo of apprehension. Here, VanderHart’s craft in ordering her poems is vital: we are not reading individual poems, but a carefully built series that deepens our sense of foreboding. At about the halfway point in the book, the suspense breaks as the fearsome things emerge, as they do in “Ballast”:
sometimes, before or after
the hand or belt, we were told
it hurt the giver more
than the receiver
a wooden spoon broke
on my sister’s body
my mother still says:
it was an old spoon
The central poems of Larks express the sorrow of the abusive family with gentleness and dignity. VanderHart writes about family dysfunction with a grace I never knew it merited before I read this book. In a world that usually confronts a painful childhood with stridency and anger, Larks meets it with care and kindness. As a survivor of the wooden spoon myself, I have been comforted by these poems. They reminded me to respond to my memories with an open heart, not a closed fist.
After revealing their traumatic childhood, VanderHart explores life afterward. Once more the flow of the poetry is an essential, well-executed aspect of the book. Having reached an emotional peak in images that express family abuse, the succeeding poems slowly lead us to tranquility. The line is not straight. There are setbacks, as described in one of my favorite poems in the book, “Poem With Trauma, Winter, and Pandemic”:
I carry my mother and father and brother
in my body
each pill is for them as it is for me
take it, my body, eat of it:
the euphoria of Valium
the calm days of Lexapro
the deep sea of Klonopin
By the end of Larks, the poems finally arrive at a safe place. The poet is on their porch, listening to the birds, in the penultimate poem, “Birdsong Sounds Out of Tune Only to the Human Ear.” The poet transforms themes and images from more distressing poems, such as not-knowing and pine trees, into images of serenity. At the end of the poem, the songs of birds “break the silence,” that was so fraught in the poet’s childhood home.
The craft of VanderHart’s poetry is exceptional. I have already touched on the order of the poems, how their thoughtful organization creates suspense, emotional peak, and tender resolution. Another noteworthy aspect of the book’s overall design is the inclusion of two title poems. The first, “Larks: Four Variations,” expresses how to survive under conditions of abuse—eyes skyward and like a bird rising above “in the blue, in that sky-space/on the wings of our child desire.” The second, “Larks,” explores the relationships of VanderHart and their sisters under painful but also beautiful conditions. The sisters inhabit a home where children were hurt (with a nod to the suffering of Greek mythic heroines), but also flew toward nature for solace: ”all three if us,/flannelled and nightgowned/on the couch together. The moon/lit. The cedars filling the night.”
The placement of these two title poems, leading up to and just past the center of the book, drive the crescendo, forte, and decrescendo of Larks, contributing greatly to the sense that the book is a whole, not the sum of parts. The title poems also illustrate VanderHart’s use of multisensory bird imagery throughout the book. Larks is infused with the color, shape, song, and rustle of birds. The presence of birds across poems is one more way the poet creates a unified and cohesive book. Birds are also a device to engender the lightness and gentleness that infuses Larks. The poet does not shrink from bird imagery; they do not down-play this imagery in a post-modern attempt to be unconventional or antirational. Larks benefits immensely from VanderHart’s generous use of birds and their appeal to our senses.
Larks also gains resonance from VanderHart’s religious imagery. In less agile hands, images from the Bible, saints, and the eucharist might be too obvious, but this is decidedly not the case under VanderHart’s deft touch. Religion and church were a part of the poet’s upbringing, and America has always been rife with religious practices devolving into child abuse. Once again, the poet does not shy away from religious imagery for fear of convention.
Rather, VanderHart does religion their way, with images that speak both corruption and joy. The positive aspects of faith are surprising and delightful aspects of Larks, as in “Poem With Split-Level Home and Pleasure.” Here the poet invokes St. Teresa of Ávila’s Interior Castle; Teresa’s idea of the soul as a castle, which may be infiltrated by the snakes and lizards of sin, is not unlike the poet’s split-level house rich in hidden and bewildering pleasures.
And it is pleasure, ultimately, that repays the reading and re-reading of Larks. The book’s alchemy is to turn grief and anguish into spacious, bright beauty. Read, and ascend.
—Dana Delibovi
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