Poet Luke Harvey explores a father’s tenderness
Luke Harvey and his wife have two daughters. His first collection of poetry, Let’s Call It Home, is dedicated to his family. If you skipped the dedication page, you would soon figure out that this collection is about that family, and especially about his daughters.
Harvey watches a child learn to crawl. He walks with a toddler in the living room (over and over again). He watches her read a book upside down. He steps carefully around random bits of toys on the floor. He’s followed wherever he goes in the house. He hears the cry demanding release from the crib. He watches a daughter running around outside.
Simple, everyday things and events in the life of a young family. Yet those simple things are something profound, and that is the point Harvey grasps as he presents his poems. Here is the title poem:
Let’s Call It Home
It begins by getting up and leaving
the evening’s habitual affairs, scraping
back your chair from the kitchen table
and your scraps into the garbage pail,
packing only cupped palms and an empty
Mason jar to chase the lightning
bug that flashed across the field.
What you’ve begun is at last the beginning,
when looking up you discover yourself
tangled in a thatch of blackberry bushes
enclosing you in a wild, overgrown
embrace, skin traced by thorns.
From this ridge you can see the dim
pin-prick you once called home.
From here you can look back over
the field—still holding the empty jar—
to see how far this faithful,
inconclusive following has led you.
The collection includes other things, of course. His experiences in teaching. Driving on a road. Sunrises. Harvey’s own growing-up experiences. How to wind down after a day at work. His definition of “pure and undefiled religion.” Home repairs and maintenance.
Luke Harvey
He writes with a simplicity and gentleness that are often surprising. You expect it when the subject is one’s children and family, but resurfacing a driveway? Yes, you sense it even there. If I had to select a single word to describe this collection, it’s “tenderness.”
Harvey has a day job (virtually all poets have a day job), and that’s teaching high school English. He also runs the Oak Haven Writing Workshops. His poems and essays have been published in a number of literary journals, including Rabbit Room Poetry, Spiritus, The Christian Century, The North American Anglican, and Delta Poetry Review, among others. He and his family live in Chickamauga, Georgia, site of a famous Civil War battle (which has nothing to do with his poetry collection but which I found interesting nonetheless).
Yes, fathers can be tenderhearted; read Luke Harvey’s poems in Let’s Call It Home, and you’ll be convinced. You’ll be reminded of your own fathering and being-fathered experiences. Harvey speaks to something both commonplace and eternal here. And he speaks simply and well.
Photo by Tambako the Jaguar, Creative Commons, via Flickr. Post by Glynn Young.
How to Read a Poem uses images like the mouse, the hive, the switch (from the Billy Collins poem)—to guide readers into new ways of understanding poems. Anthology included.
“I require all our incoming poetry students—in the MFA I direct—to buy and read this book.”
—Jeanetta Calhoun Mish
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