Exploring Luke Harvey’s debut collection, Let’s Call It Home
‘Home is the place where, when you have to go there, They have to take you in.’ ‘I should have called it Something you somehow haven’t to deserve.’ — from “Death of the Hired Man” by Robert Frost
Review by Michael Dechane
Luke Harvey’s meditative, seriously playful, faith-infused debut collection is Let’s Call It Home, the latest in the lengthening line of fine voices that make up the Poiema Series from Cascade Books. The collection is gathered in three sections: Lullabies of Ascent, Spiritus Vertiginis, and Returning (Let’s Call It) Home.
Lullabies of Ascent
“Come,” the opening poem in the collection, invokes (without promoting) the specter of ‘worm theology’ that gives me such dis-ease and the shudders these days. But there’s a lovely engagement here too, with mystery that science hasn’t been able to penetrate, even when it comes to the humblest of subjects. Why do earthworms come to the surface in the rain? Nobody knows — not even the greatest worm learners among us. And we get this potent reflection in the closing couplet:
this odd insistence that—even if
it kills us—we inch our way to light.
In the next poem, “Learning to Crawl,” we find a compact narrative lyric on the experience of a father watching their daughter begin to move on their own, an occasion the speaker finds ripe with possibilities for the spiritual life:
a blazing conviction
that there is somewhere beyond
the here worth getting to.
The wonders and wildness of being a new parent give the speakers in these poems good ground to explore for all of us ostensibly grown-ups. Harvey avers the power of the fresh delight in his toddler’s wake. And he swerves short of the hackneyed shallowness we often project onto the innocence of our littlest sojourners.
In the third poem, “Provisional” (a word any student of Scott Cairns must contend with), a father walks alongside and behind his daughter who carries a menagerie of animals in her arms. Shuffling after this tiny human ark, the father speaker in the poem carries things, too: “words and ideas of how the world/works” and we’re all carried along to the center of the poem when the daughter “suddenly stops as if realizing/something” and there’s a kind of transformation where she drops everything she’s carrying for an impromptu, unguarded celebration of whatever has come over her — or come up in her — and she is “all light now.”
And the fourth poem, “Tuesday Morning, Thirtieth Week of Ordinary Time”, breaks the kind of spell of the first triad of poems with a small tragedy. It’s another narrative poem, this time a speaker stopping to check on an older man who’s hit and killed a deer on the highway. Late in the poem,
A semi punctuates
his words and divides
the deer in half.
calling to mind, for me at least, the gory scene of the Abrahamic covenant. This poem’s juxtaposition with the string of early sweet ones gives us a real sense of different gears this collection will shift through as we go.
One of the early themes that emerges in the first section of the book is a parent’s deep, reengagement with the play, wonder, and experience of being a child. In gently articulated reflections, we get soulful claims about the adult world we readers must inhabit and move through. Late in “Stepping Stones” a narrative poem about walking on lava floors that tests out a speaker’s direct address to the reader for the first time (“I needn’t tell you”), we’re offered:
Ours is a bric-a-brac path
we craft one tip-toe at a time,
balancing on what we have
while reaching for what we don’t,
imagining our careful way across
the wide floor-plan of our sojourn.
Walking, picking out the way (especially the way home) are themes that suffuse each of the three sections in the book.
Structurally, Harvey favors couplets, tercets, and other regular stanzas even though he’s regularly working a narrative poem you might expect to see in a single strophe or more irregularly shaped strophes. Just another indication that we’re in the presence of a thoughtful, measured, voice intent on making real poems.
Spiritus Vertiginis
I love the opening of “Revealing, Re-veiling” in the second section of the book: “Suppose we surrender the words.” With this acknowledgement that we need more than words (a bold challenge for a poet to overcome in the top of a poem!) the speaker eases into the reality that we still reach for words to say what the spiritual is like as best we can.
And the poem ends in an image of a breath catching a curtain with a little movement, the invisible becoming visible through the receptive folds of what covers the window introduced in Line 10, about halfway through the poem. This movement from ideas and heady abstractions to images and the embodied stuff of living really starts to gain momentum by this point in the collection.
By the way, it’s an impressive chorus of saints and others that sprinkle the work with epigraphs and less overt indebtedness: St. Symeon … St. John of the Cross … Alphonse Frankenstein … St. Gregory of Nyssa … Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn … Fr. Seraphim Rose … Frost … Heaney … Cairns, and more are part of the great cloud of witnesses hovering around these lyrics and little exhortations to wake up, O sleepy ones.
Of course, things here are more than a bit grim and still a bit more dim. Seeing, or trying to see, comes up quite a bit in these poems. In “Word Hollows” we find “eyes which pry the dark”.
The deepening curiosity of the speakers in the poems continues its build here, as well. What might be hiding, or living, inside our words? Inside the shapes of the letters on the page? Inside the various hearts of the best words we have to say what can’t be said?
In the final line of “Word Hollows” we find the word “havening” as the speaker calls us to wonder about shelter. Doesn’t most of our common language resemble the horrifying pictures of homes, hospitals, and places of worship now bomb-pocked, shrapnel scarred, and broken open to the heavens with our warring?
What kind of shelter could “great” provide in our current moment? Or even “peace”? My sense is the speaker here insists on durable and persistent possibilities for indwelling even our gravest misspellings and propagandic misappropriations.
And there’s a lovely turn inside the turn of the closing couplet.
If true, who else might we find
havening in our word-hollows?
It’s “who” (with a backward wink toward the owl in Zephaniah’s epigraph and in the first stanza) not “what” we might find havening. What potent possibilities “who” holds, no?
“Compost Bin” brings the work of Buechner and others to mind — a kind of rehabilitating or nurturing back to life some tired words. Words so beneath our notice we neglect their nutrients, their essentialness in the health of the soil of what we have to say.
Even if they’re words as tossed-aside as earth-
worm, broccoli crown, melon rind,
and other ends and odd
derivations we find in this pile
of castings we meddle in.
The lineation work here to break “earthworm” in half creates a creation care commentary. As our dereliction of duty to tend the planet with a tender attentiveness goes, so goes our poverty of speech.
Centering the humbleness of the compost bin and its miraculous work to make a sustaining ground for our gardens out of scraps and worm dung prepares the way for the real humbler: this rehab work is endless (“Even then, when there’s no finishing”), and we likely won’t see the fulfillment of what we hope (“and nothing to show for our faith-fullness”).
Again, the lineation work here to break “faithfulness” in pieces creates surprising possibilities for meaning. How does “nothing to show for our faith” rub shoulders with “faith without works is dead”? How does it carry on its own conversations with the rewards our Father will give to the faithful, or to their star-filled crowns?
After so much tilling work, the poem finds a sweet exhortation in its final furrows: “let us return” the speaker urges us, and try on the idea that we the gardeners are also, in a different sense, the fresh, vibrant new growth in the garden that was tended long before we sprouted here,
opening to the light our few true leaves
as we dream of a fruit so ripe
it speaks for itself.
And, once more, we’re left in the very end with image … something that says what our finest words cannot obtain.
“Over the Know-Ledge” is, to my mind, the most wonderful recurrence of Harvey’s ideas-to-image movements. In the opening of the poem, we’re invited to draw an abstract shape in our minds — just something to define a space. This exercise is developed and teased out until we get to the utterly wonky syntax in the fifth strophe:
Welcome to the turvy-topsy,
your intro course in dyslexic theology
in which you meet the one
in being we whom and move and have.
The serious wordplay of the collection keeps deepening here as Harvey encourages us to swim farther and farther from the perpetually provisional sands of the shorelines we’re inclined to cling to as we go.
And then the sweet interruption of the Jesus Prayer chiastically hinges one of the longest poems in the book.
The second half is a distinct movement in this two-part harmonious-symphonious as we return again to the concrete, to the real stuff of life.
It’s rude to interject a mechanical metaphor here to describe the lovely, organic movements of the soul that Luke circumscribes. But I do think of a two-stroke engine, at this point. Words and their abstractions and linguistic connotations are the intake stroke. Meaning compresses. Things combust in a burst of images, of things. And we locomote down the underwater railroad line. Beautiful.
Returning (Let’s Call It) Home
“Drafting a Will at 29, Just In Case” is a litany poem that manages some good humor under its slightly ominous title. Some of the threads that Harvey has woven throughout the earlier sections of the book manifest here, too: composting, ars poetica riffs, parenting, and celebrating a kind of foolishness.
I sense a little tonal shift in the voice that the direct address couched in a fittingly formal register attains to in lines like:
To the Eternal Exhale I return
mine, and anything good that came
of it. To the Eternal Inhale I go
like the dust to which I’ve returned.
And the poem’s closing manages one last gentle crack as Death comes knocking. Just a small joke for those of us who remain, as the speaker remembers what “light sleepers” the dead are. The third section of the book is ripe with existential quips and questions like this.
“Creek Walk Epistle” is a letter in 10 tiny chapters that navigates more than your humble backyard waterway. By the end, we’re conscious again of a “farther shore” even if we can’t quite glimpse it from here.
“Waiting In Line” illuminates some of what’s so easy to forget about the various rat races we’re likely to trace day after day.
And in “Coming, Coming”, the speaker touches on some of those midlife gluttonous glitches and instances of lustfulness that we know — in the depths — only perfume a passing moment with an ornamental imitation of what we’re really after.
I love the opener for “Encouragement for the Living Dead”:
None of this is going to work
out. The boat will sink,
or the boat will float another
hundred years before
it sinks.
The bad news that turns out to be good news — even if that’s questionable encouragement — builds and builds through the poem to a genuine slap in the ego’s face:
So breathe
easy, friend. You’re dead already.
You can never die. Fear not.
Fear not. Once more, Scriptures or the preserved wisdom of the saints reverberates in a poetic mouth that is deadly serious about lightening up a bit — at least enough to live a little of the real living in the midst of all this dying.
I find it a compelling, inviting voice. And if it gets a smidgen preachy now and then, it feels like the kind of unpretentious sermon that’s likely to actually do a body and soul some good. It’s an astonishing debut collection. This is fine work that’s mighty fine company and worth many returns for further considerations.
Michael Dechane is a poet who carves wooden spoons and indulges his passion for historic home renovation. A “word-tender and wonder-vendor,” his work has appeared in Image, Southern Poetry Review, Tar River, Lake Effect, Spiritus, and elsewhere. In 2020, he was awarded Ruminate’s Broadside Poetry Prize. He serves as the VP of Communications on the Board of the North Carolina Poetry Society. With his partner, Regan, he is a custodian of a home built in 1900 in a cove forest on the French Broad River, north of Asheville, NC. Learn more at michaeldechane.com