ࡱ> c bjbjNN .2$i$iFu  844#"""""""%'f""4"KKK"K"KKKp`XsK"#04#K2(H2(K2(KxK""<4#2(Y ;: Poetry All Around Us: The Work of West Virginia Poet Laureate Marc Harshman by S. Bailey Shurbutt I understood early on that nobody was going to listen to anything I had to say, so I might as well say what I want to.Irene McKinney If words could save a world, writes George Ella Lyon, they would be those of Marc Harshman, which celebrate the woods and small farms of Marshall County, West Virginia, often the setting for much of his poetry. Referencing specifically Harshmans Local Journeys volume (2004), Lyon notes that Harshmans vision is so attuned to this landscape every step is a revelation. Each little thing that happens, each unassuming observation reveals the intricate connection that constitutes life. The change of seasons, the small particulars of the natural world, all reveal the real and the lasting in the everyday. Poem by poem, writes Lyon, we travel deeper into a miraculous maze/ of shadow and bark, where the poet open[s] / the trees . . . as if opening / the rooms of paradise (Mushrooms qtd. in Poetry). It is little wonder then that on May 18, 2012, with the passing of that icon of poetic purposefulness Irene McKinney, Marc Harshman would be tagged as the next West Virginia poet laureate. Harshmans own journey from the flat terrain of Randolph County, on the eastern edge of Indiana where he grew up, to the rolling hills of West Virginia, where he has made home and experienced his literary life, has been, at least on the surface, one driven by both service and creative expression. After graduating from Bethany College in 1973, Harshman went on to Yale Divinity School, where he earned a Masters Degree in 1975. In 1976, he married librarian Cheryl Ryan, who shared his love of literature and who is a writer and artist in her own right. Harshmans literary proclivities pushed him on to the University of Pittsburgh, where he finished a Master of Arts degree in 1978. There and at West Virginia Northern Community College, he taught creative writing and English composition, until he settled into a teaching job in a three-room schoolhouse in Sand Hill, teaching fifth and sixth grades in Marshall County and indulging himself and his students in his love of reading and writing. In 1995, Harshman was selected by the West Virginia Language Arts Council as State English Teacher of the Year for his inspiring teaching of children. During this time as well, Cheryl and Marc raised their daughter Sarah Jayne and carved a rich and full life for their family in rural West Virginia. It was from his experiences as a middle school teacher that Harshmans love of language and creative imagination turned to inspiring children through words and stories. Harshman has said this about his purpose as a storyteller, which is to help children understand themselves through a love of language and learning and to appreciate writing as a vehicle for self-discovery: I want [children] to see that they have at their fingertips possibilities for creating new visions of themselves and their world, visions that will not only help them be better writers but better people as well (Contemporary Authors 3). Harshman has been a prolific creator of childrens books, publishing his first in 1989, A Little Excitement. A Little Excitement tells the story of Willie, a boy who longs for a break in the sameness of farm life in winter and has some unexpected adventures. Harshman saw the picture-book format as ideal for teaching mathematical concepts and abstractions to children. For example, his award-winning story, Only One, through its clever narrative and illustrations, attempts to help young children comprehend complex mathematical concepts such as grouping. Booklist contributor Carolyn Phelan notes, as have others, that the folk-style artwork of Only One and its math vocabulary, make the book unique among childrens books (qtd. in Contemporary Authors 2). Other critics have likewise noted that the folktale aspect of the books gives them a universal quality: [Harshman] portrays everyday people in folktale-like circumstances, giving his works an air of timelessness (Contemporary Authors 3). Books like The Storm teach children about overcoming their fears and about tolerance for those with disabilities. Harshmans childrens books have been translated into Spanish, Danish, Swedish, Japanese, and Korean, and they have garnered prestigious awards, including a Smithsonian Notable Book for Children Award and Parents Choice Award for The Storm, which was also chosen as a Junior Literary Guild Selection. Only One was a PBS Reading Rainbow selection, while Only One Neighborhood (2007), co-authored and illustrated by Barbara Garrison, has received similar praise. Other books, such as Red Are Apples (Harcourt 2001), co-authored with wife Cheryl, and Roads written with Mary Newell DePalma (2002), encourage the imagination and the emerging sensibilities of young readers. In 1994 Harshman received the University of Minnesotas Ezra Jack Keats/Kerlan Fellowship in order to study and research Scandinavian folklore, and in 2000 he received a WV Arts Commission Fellowship in Poetry followed in 2007 by a WV Arts Commissions Fellowship in Childrens Literature. In a recent interview, Harshman noted that there was a strong connection between his childrens stories and his poetry, and certainly there is a love of language that underpins both his childrens books and his poetry volumes. Harshmans first volume of poetry, Turn Out the Stones (State Street Press 1983) was followed by a steady stream of books: Rose of Sharon (Mad River Press 1999), Local Journeys (Finishing Line Press, 2005), Green-Silver and Silent (Bottom Dog Press 2012), All that Feeds Us: The West Virginia Poems (Quarrier Press 2013), Believe What You Can (Vandalia 2016), Woman in Red Anorak (Lynx House 2018), and Following the Silence (Press 53 2023). Harshman has been published in a range of journals and poetry collections, including The Anthology of Appalachian Writers and publications and anthologies at Kent State University, University of Iowa, University of Georgia, University of Arizona, and other presses. He was interviewed by Grace Cavalieri for The Poet and the Poem series at the Library of Congress (1997-2016, Part I), where he shared his ideas about poetry and writing. Harshman has said this about his own poetry: My poems are frequently narrations [that] spring from specific and local geographies, be they the rural Indiana where I was raised, the West Virginia where I have lived my adult life, or the towns and farms of Canada and England where I have traveled. . . . The free verse in which I compose is intended to be voiced, to be heard, and is informed by the harmonies and rhythms of traditional verse and pushed towards new hearing by the emotional pressures of the breath itself (qtd. in Guide to Resources). The oral tradition thus strongly influences Harshmans poetry, and one of the best ways to experience this quality is to listen to the Cavalieri interview with Harshman or any audio interview where he reads his work. Harshman is a superb reader, of his own and the verse of others. As we read aloud and experience Marc Harshmans poetry, we are immersed in the specific, in the particular, in order to gain a sense of the universal. Harshman has said that our language holds the power to challenge and persuade, comfort, inform, and ultimately to reveal truths about who we are. He continues, again linking his poetry with his childrens stories: Through our language, the best of who we are is preserved. An artists manipulation of words through rhythms, images, and countless other figures is a high calling. It is my duty to remind others that the language is their language, a living thing renewed by what theyits speakers and writersbring to it. As a childrens writer, I also see an opportunity to promote a vision of writing and storytelling that is natural to everyday living, giving children a means of responding to the world. Indeed, as we read Harshmans commissioned poem, A Song for West Virginia, republished in the Homer Hickam volume of The Anthology of Appalachian Writers, we sense not only the uniqueness of the state but the people of West Virginia, as we enjoy with the poet a Whitmanesque experience of the macrocosm through the varied names, events, places, and people that constitute the microcosm of a particular place. Mountains called Nathanial Coal, Cheat, Blair. Rivers called Potomac, Kanawha, Greenbrier, New, Elk, Ohio. Remembered places: Droop, Green Bank, Arthurdale, Blennerhasset, Matewan. Beauty and tragedy, heroism and courage stitch the patches of our historys quilt. The patchwork quilt is the controlling image in the poem as Harshman takes us on an historic journey through time, focusing on the dreamers, the movers and shakers, and the unique significance of this oft-maligned state: dreaming and beginning . . . / All our heroes for the working class: Sid Hatfield, Blizzard, Mother Jones, Rether, Hechler, Larry Gibson . . . shoulder to shoulder. The story of West Virginia is one to applaud, writes Harshman, so . . . whoop it up, this celebration, dream it big! Add names to this song, yours, mine and all those to come. Do as our ancestors across the waters didlight bonfires atop hill and mountain, let the message travel from Charleston to Bluefield, from Williamson to Harpers Ferry, and back to Wheeling, that mountaineers are still free! The speaker admonishes us to take up the patches of this history quilt, this / dream-flagged quilt. Wave it high and walk proud. Turning Out the Stones, 1983 In many ways this exquisite early volume set the tone and tenor for all the volumes that followed. There is a longing to be one with nature, to tame the physical world that feeds us, challenges us, and sometimes vanquishes us. There is likewise an unbreakable thread of stoicism and acceptance running through these poems, many of which reflect memories of Harshmans youth in Indiana but which also capture the fatalism and stoic acceptance of the Celtic roots of the Appalachian region of West Virginia. The tillers of the land try to impose order and ownership on the land (First Cutting), but often the effort avails little: the ground says beans but Chicago says wheat . . . It is a science against me, / it bends my spine (The Figuring and Squaring Out). Sometimes the pleasure provided by an activity like berry picking might seem a treasured reward, but seizing those berries and their succulent taste must be achieved with care to escape the pricks and scratches of harvesting. Try as we might to be one with the natural world, the effort often escapes us; we are, after all, work, rest and reading in tranquil moments found from the continual struggle to make a living from the hard scrabble physical world around us. The grandfather figure in this collection most reflects this struggle to maintain hearth and home in what is fundamentally a capricious if glorious physical world: I say what the hell . . . / makes an old man . . . keep it up / five rows of corn, five boxes of books, a boy with pale skin / who likes to read, says, let me read, Granddad, / and I have. This volume will also give Harshman the title for his 2012 collection Greensilver & Silent, which serves as a metaphor for the eternal and unknowable (Diving for the Drowned), where the poet searches for the stories and the understanding that might reveal the mystery of the natural world, but alas . . . having brought no answers but the persistent one that lives with the telling, the return of words that keep us close to each other. Perhaps from time to time the poet comes close to this understanding and oneness, as in Setting the Hook, where the line reads to the fingers, / to become the fish, the stream, but the fact is that both certitude and understanding the Mystery are elusive: the night is alive and navigable by their language . . . But now from here, only trees . . . by which I can only guess . . . only hills, and this, the only world there used to be. (Eight Mile Ridge) Rose of Sharon, 1999 The Rose of Sharon volume continues to explore the relationship between the natural world and the human society that inhabits and attempts to tame and find order in it. However, there are distinct differences between the two volumes. In this volume human society frames the volume, with a taste for the epicurean in There Will Be Dancing notable at the beginning of the collection. The line A fiddle tune bearing, sweet as fruit recalls a time of dancing and merriment, with garlic and lamb simmering / in a black pan. Likewise, the volume closes with a reference to a close-knit family gathered in the warm and cozy stove roomreading, writing letters to fathers, listening / to remember, and practicing, / like a dance . . . in a warm room / on a cold night (Knitting). The final poem Eight Mile Ridge repeats the line Where they come to their waters, echoing the Celtic idea of water as the division between the spirit and physical worlds. The poems in between meliorate somewhat the separation between human and natural worlds explored in Turning Out Stones. Another interesting component of these Rose of Sharon poems comes from the references to Hindu philosophy which explain the cycle of existent in terms of a trinity composing Brahmanthat is, Brahma the creator, Vishnu the Earthly extension of Universal Spirit and preservation, and Shiva which is eternal change and destruction. Together these constitute a universal plan that embodies the Mystery. The very title of the volume implies a kind of reconciliation in the seeming harshness of the plan, with the Rose of Sharon suggesting the Christian symbol for Christ and reflective of hope and salvation for human society. For example, the juxtaposition of orchard and cemetery in New Lisbon Cemetery and Orchard imposes an orderly green testament, a claim / for the future. The setting is a metaphor for the plan / of what we would have / all this mean, which is a plan that recognizes, the plotting / of fruit and harvest as well as the necessary fallow. The rude things of the natural world, like the pungent wild onion, only promise to sweeten / the march into April. Even the ominous buzzard that loops effortlessly has an important place in the plan, promising purpose / where we cannot see. As we attempt to discern the nature of Spiritus Mundi or What Isnt There, we might find it in the gust that falls through the leavesthe wind that echoes silver and / shadow, . . . a shadow / bending in a light which the poet will not likely see much less completely discern. What human society can readily perceive of Spirit in the physical world are intimations of What Isnt Therefor example sounds of coming spring like First Frogs which the speaker hears as he lies fevered and ill. These unasked for surprises offer moments of refreshment and glimpses enlightenment for his own small soul, equally part of the Mystery. Even the most poignant signs of death and decay are clear promises of what is to come: The sunflower lowers its head, its many hearts dusty and stooped. The sky is full of heat, hill, white storms and a few blue flags . . . Seeds in orange and brown pods and shells stiffen, darken, prepare for flight. (Promises) For everywhere the journey is readied: seed to earth, birds to sky. There is no need to pine for the loss since they will return. Indeed, [i]n their absence, certain deaths, the sigh / of winter, then ice, long night, and rest are sure to come. There is throughout the Rose of Sharon volume a sense of reconciliation to this plan that offers the possibility for both regeneration and continuation. Local Journeys, 2005 Local Journeys takes the plan for the Natural World, which is one of change and transformation, and applies it to the human world. It is a plan that augers hope even as it reflects nature red in tooth and claw, as Tennyson expressed in a time equally complex in its vision of the natural world. It is certain as well in the final poem of the volume, Reading the Landscape, that Harshman offers a clear-eyed and realistic view of the natural worlda world . . . without hope of translation the best I can do is hold out my hand: an invitation, a greeting, a first breath behind the first-letter in the first word. If separation is inevitable, there are nonetheless moments and activities, like gathering mushrooms, when one feels a closeness with Earth, though it may not always be a benevolent mother. As Robert Morgan often does in his poetry, Harshman provides appealing lists that both connect the reader with the subject and with an underpinning spirit revealed in Nature. In the poem Mushrooms Harshman regals the reader with a variety of mushroomsa fungi that lives off the refuse of the natural world while it provides succulent nourishment. As the speaker and his scavenging partner walk through the woods, they encounter a colorful array of fungirussulas, oysters, boletes, agarics, and horns of plenty. The forest is rich with this botanical bounty. However, it is the chanterelles only that their searching eyes are after, for they provide a rich taste /of earth and make the foragers feel close to Earth as if / we mattered (Mushrooms). It is an appealing illusion. This volume is filled with poems that provide lovely lists, from the cowslips, larkspurs, and dogfoot violets of Mechanical Meadow to the ferns, bloodroot, trillium, cowslips and blue-eyed Marys of Sallys Backbone. The rich array of objects give the illusion of connection and intimacy with the Natural World. In Middle Bowman Run, for example, the speaker praises the pleasure of a night walk, where the sounds of night auger consolation despite the obvious danger: a rocks inexplicable fall / tearing thunder through the brush / the bobcat sirening, / the deers bark and snort. These sounds are a kind of music / with which [one] can sleep. A key poem in this volume is January Sixth, which is the day the Magi visited the new-born Christ-child, indicating the religious significance of the poem. Images of silver associated with the snow and winter are representative in Harshmans symbolic scheme of Eternity and Mystery. As snow filters silver through the trees and as the sun fades, the tiniest buds promise change and rebirth, and we are part of this rebirthor at the very least chances that there will be / what is not yet. All that Feeds Us, 2013, and Green Silver and Silent Poems, 2018 Several of the poems in Local Journeys and All that Feeds Us are reprinted in the Green Silver and Silent volume, particularly in part two of the three-part Green Silver and Silent collection, where they transition, as does the volume, to a brighter vision. Section I is the memory section, looking backward at the bad luck, the hard-scrabble farming life, and the vicissitudes and struggles that mark the previous volumes; but there is a decided difference in Green Silver and Silent, an insistence that spring will come, shining like milk on a cloudy day, as the speaker asserts in Why Not Wish. The hopeful intimations are not only of immortality, as Wordsworth would write, but of an understanding that behind the chaos and darkness is green-silver and silence. In one of the prose poems Harshman includes in this volume, Breaking the Ice, a boy is charged with going out in the bone cold to clear the cistern, but this harsh task in the frigid weather is meliorated by a surge of music he hears within, a burst of melody whose echoes reinvent summer. It is clear that neither this dreary life nor the stoic attitude that accepts the drear with resignation will have the final wordrather, it is the dancers [who] inherit the party. This knowledge mitigates the Old Testament plan of a Universe created by a stern deity, represented by Blakes Urizen measuring the Universe and suggested in Harshmans Late September, where deity sets loose a Sisyphean plan of frustration and defeat. However, this section of the volume ends with a lovely ho-down portrayed in the poem Dancing, a poem that leaves the reader with an epicurean vision and an understanding that the dancers do indeed inherit the party: Love here the dance the blood-fired joy circle up four. . . and go! Even in the final section of the collection, which focuses on death and dying, the dominant theme is dancing, which forecasts a gusto for life (There Will Be Dancing); and the bell that tolls for each passing soul (Tintinnalogia) also tolls for each new dancer coming forth to take his place in the dance: but a music, still, ringing song, surprising out of death the good giftto be in the hope rung from the leaping ropes into the blindingly passionate clamour above. Green Silver and Silent closes with the little poem What There Is, which leaves us with the image of a batch of eartha metaphor for spring and new lifeamid the snow and shadow of winter and death. Believe What You Can, 2016 Despite its occasional whimsey and seemingly deft touch with dark subjects, Believe What You Can is Harshmans most profoundly serious book, at least at the time of its publication in 2016. It is a book in four distinct parts grappling with questions about life and death within a Plan that does not clearly indicate a moral force for good at its core. The first section of the collection deals with stories of places and characters such as Aunt Helen and Grandmother at the Dressmakers which set the tone for the other parts of the collection. For example, in Yew Piney Mountain for Doug Van Gundy, Harshman asserts that There are no easy endings, and yet the pulse keeps ticking where the faceless player predictably returns the up-and-down ladder of seconds and days and years. This poem, placed at the beginning of the volume, poses a pointed question about the meaning of lifethat is, whether it is running with whiskey, / or running with fire, or merely running to run. In some sense, the rest of the volume attempts to answer the question, and finally the poet asserts there may neither be questions nor answers when all is said and done. Our time on Earth comes with a Return Ticket, and there is little doubt that this speed-ride through existence is merely a game of chance. Grandmother at the Dressmakers (Part I) gives us a look at how important these teleological questions are to Harshman, as he watches his grandmother pushing on with the routine of the everyday while he searches for meaning amid the trivia of the ordinary and the tragic irony of an uncaring Universe. The speaker asserts: It was not poetry. Not yet. But it was life as I knew it and I was keen to know it more, to keep gathering as I did berries and stamps and pebbles, to see what rarities might show up, sparkle, and speak. The stories of part one of Believe What You Can are followed by vignettes in the final three parts that suggest, when all is said and done, there is little better to do than accept the darkness. The imagery of the last three parts of the volume is dark, the landscape bleak, the seasons fading as is the light. Our lives are the quilted swirl of crazy pieces (Pieta, Part II), and there is nothing to be done but accept the darkness. It will be enough to remember / everything as it is. / And so he promises to make up nothing but the truth (A Moon Somewhere Else, Part II). The poems in Part III suggest that any individual salvation can only come through embracing the disruption and chaos of ones journey, because . . . everything is not completely haphazard and because there are times when we get another chance (Not Quite Haphazardly, Part III). As Harshman explores the senselessness of war, the speaker in the poem Fucked admits to what he calls Fuck politicsLittle kids, parts of their bodies just strewn across the ground like windblown trash. The sad thing is that our boys did this, and we, as individuals on the home-front, are in and out of the game of this existence as quickly as the nightly news or Lowell Thomas evening sign off, So long . . . until tomorrow (Fucked, Part III). Section three of the Believe What You Can collection ends with the tragic poem Vehicular, where the surprise of a deadly car accident is a metaphor for the thoughtless serendipity and crass causality of lifea moment that refuses to move beyond that glance / back over your shoulder where the living die. As the volume draws to a close, section four suggests there is nothing to be done but embrace the Mystery and the seeming chaos of the Plan, as callous as it may appear. We must be like the Stone, Harshmans metaphor for such stoic acceptance of the Mysteryand perhaps we ourselves might become silent, small and perfect as a stone, patient, and listening, as I am, for what comes next. (Stone, Part IV) Perhaps the best we can actually hope for are the small miracles that punctuate our lives: the ticking of the clock, the coming of the morning sun, and the running of the creek, heedless of time and responsibility (Recoveries Part IV)but no less miracles themselves. And yes, there is always Beethovens Razumovsky Quartet and the jaunty birdsong melody clear as water in the violins, as if water could sing and light could be held (Peters Mountain, Part IV). Just as certain as the refuse of starlings decorating the sidewalk with their rose and ivory starbursts after consuming mulberries (Jackson Pollock and the Starlings, Moundsville, West Virginia, Part IV), we must learn to appreciate and simply accept these little surprises of life for what they are: My tea is cold. The god asleep. The rain gone. And somewhere the owl is sliding the silence into the hidden trees of a deeper night with no questions about philosophy, with no questions at all. (With No Questions Part IV) The poems of Believe What You Can are deceptively jaunty and thus a pleasure to sit with for an afternoon despite the serious message which lingers long after the book is set aside, a message underscored in the Woman in Red Anorak volume, winner of the 2017 Blue Lynx Prize for poetry. Woman in Red Anorak, 2018 Despite the direness and blunt truth of these poems, Woman in Red Anorak is a beautifully written volume and engaging to read without leaving one with a sense of woefulness. Indeed, as poet/critic and Pushcart prize winner Lynn Emanuel writes, one of the salient features of the book is its neighborliness. There are three parts to the collection, with the first section exploring death and loss, yet leaving one with a sense of hope in the form of a Woman in the Red Anorak, the poem which closes the first section of the volume. The woman stands beside a man dreaming of war, a man who has fought and suffered a hundred deaths beyond in his memory of the shells thunder: There had been a woman in a red anorak standing with him, standing in the middle of a sea just before a storm, Then came lightning, falling mirrors, the quiet after, the believing. The second part of the volume offers poems which explore small wonders offering hope and perhaps trustcrickets, tree frogs and owls, an innocent kissbut also the crass surprises that punctuate our lives with tragedy. These surprises move us forward to unknown destinies amid the rituals that sustain us, like Hog Butchering, and the fears that have shaped us, like school children practicing for nuclear annihilation during the Cuban Missile crisis (October 1962). And the work of the poet is thus to share the glimpses of meaning he discerns in such a Plan, despite its crassnesswhile his wife marvels at his evening walks and forays into the dark storms and at the words he will summon to offer fair warning to others: He always carries a few extra words and shares them now, laying them on the bench like crumbs for pigeons. On his return from one of these rueful, rainy expeditions, his wife will shake her head, . . . . realizing hes again giving away words, even though they know there are so very few of them left. (On His Evening Walk) Indeed, this volume is a tour de force of both words and style, as Harshman experiments with prose poetry and a playful use of language. In Keep Calm, for example, he enlivens the prose format of the poem with playful chiasmus that carries a message of woeful anticipation of a soldier who awaits the war by attempting to believe in the mundanity of the moment that The baby will go on crying, the boys fast-click their mouse into battle, grandmother continue to knit and dream, dream and knit, and wife wait for the microwave to ring its little bell, a happy signal that it is time to join the family and break bread together. The poet is ever filled with hope and certitude to continue the search for understanding despite dark omens. He has yet a kind of hope for Tomorrow, a shovel and a pick. There are diamonds to find and a hole through my heart to open the future. (Devotion) Harshman closes the volume with a miraculous landing of a jetliner in the backyard of a woman, who takes the incident in stride and likewise takes in the passengers with a warm welcome: No use trying to explain it; things just happen, she tells herself. Big plane lands in your backyard and, a hundred years from now, who knows how the story will be told. Anyway, shes glad for the company, though, and if they plan to travel on, she means to join them (The Company of Heaven). Following the Silence, 2023 Harshmans 2023 collection is perhaps his best volume. The poems give the reader a sense of the ephemerality of time, place, and peopleindeed, of life itself. While questions about lifes meaning are still in the forefront of the poets mind, the answers are clearly not necessarily to be found, except through side-long glimpses indirectly here and there. Indeed, knowing and understanding will not happen, at least in this life, for The gods of wisdom have all fled and there is no one to tell us what this means (Waiting for an Explanation). To achieve but a glimpse, however, we must be silent, listen to the language of the Universe, and follow the silence. Harshman writes in the key poem of part one that we must hear forest, its crickets / and frogs and birds, taking the paths not knowing what we were following and not knowing, nor caring where they led / but enjoying the chase (Following the Silence). However, the natural world is key to any understanding we discern. In Seeing Is Believing the tangible objects around us are our connection not only to that understanding but also to those who have passed on before us: . . . your memory persists, that these letters can still assemble, dance, and disturb. But you already know this, dont you, hovering there, in that meadow, watching as the window opens? The artist who captures nature, whether painter or poet, can help us see and understand. An example is Charles Burchfields watercolors, capturing pools of light, / sun and snow, shimmering (Locust Grove). Certainly, the poet can also do this, but he must be crafty and slippery as a cat burglar, slipping past and through and out of doors and windows, casements and cellars inhabiting a sixth sense, studying the arcane craftsmanship . . . and the carefully measured placement of a dollop of oil. (Cat Burglar) For Harshman, every moment has a story: I watch a woman walk resolutely on / into the racing fog and wonder where she is going (Red Hen and Small Woman). Most important, the essence of the Universe is flux, change, transience, with poems such as Its Foolish to Go Looking offering a Keatsean understanding of the idea of permanence amid the flux: It is foolish to go looking for the dream . . . should the old familiar dream find and surprise you, you can take comfort it found its way here almost as easily and quickly as you. Though the fragility of life is keenly felt in the Following the Silence collection, there is little sense of lament or keening. A favorite haunt for the speaker is actually the cemetery, a place / beyond which dreams / no longer campaign: Everyone here agrees that, though collagen once ruled, held things together, and does so no more, theyre not sad, but happy for the chance to fly, to show us to the best seats for the black parade. (Halloween Storm) Following the Silence offers the reader an array of individuals and places to ponder. There are Catherine, the abused wife, Mariners, on their voyage out, the Union Organizer with his challenging work, Elmer the kind farmer who lifts the child with scarlet fever to his knee and thus lifts his spirits, as well as a range of writers and artists like Emily Carr, and places like Beech Glen and Elk Ridge. Even the simplicity of an ordinary coffee can reflects knowledge to some degree but nothing offers absolute clarity or certitude. The poet tells us in Knowledge: This is important. I may need another box or, perhaps, simply, this coffee can with its green lid waiting patiently beside the enameled stove. The speaker will search on for the smallest flicker of movement, be it a blue heron or some other symbol from the natural world; and the poet will hold up this thread once light, now words, perhaps still aquiver and, if lucky, transparent with the ways of the nameless gods whove not yet left us here alone in this lonely land (Knowledge). However, symbols notwithstanding come dropping slow; and, when all is said and done, everything is a metaphor (Symbolic), and the poet will continue to send forth words to any who searches as he for hope: Ill sing the saddest songs I can find . . . and do as I always do, throw words ahead of me and follow, hoping against hope, as Father liked to say, which now I hear sounds pretty hopeless. (The Winter Box) Like Keats who embraced the material sublime, Marc Harshman is clearly the poet of things in the here and now. He closes this exquisite volume with a statement for living in the moment, something most of us are woefully inadequate to do but which animals certainly have a facility for: Just here, an open, August field unadorned and empty save for them [horses], the air raw and alive, . . . the liquid pools of their dignified eyes . . . with them, to be in their company, a step can be taken, a breath drunk that might be the saving of your life and, if begun in time, the saving of the world, as well, might begin just so, just here, just now. (Just Here, Where These Horses) Works Cited Cavalieri, Grace. The Poet and the Poem. Library of Congress. Web. Harshman, Marc. All that Feeds Us. Charleston, WV: Quarrier Press, 2013. _____________. Believe What You Can. Morgantown, WV: Vandalia Press, 2016. _____________. Following the Silence. Winston-Salem: Press 53, 2023. _____________. Green Silver and Silent. Huron, Ohio: Bottom Dog Press, 2012. _____________. Local Journeys. Georgetown, KY: Finishing Line Press, 2004. _____________. Poetry. Marc Harshman Website. Web. _____________. Rose of Sharon. Eureka, CA: Mad River Press, 1999. _____________. Turning Out the Stones. Pittsford, NY: State Street Press, 1983. _____________. Woman in Red Anorak. Spokane: Lynx House Press, 2018. Marc Harshman. Contemporary Authors. Thomas Gale, 2004. Print. Marc Harshman. Guide to Resources for the Study of West Virginia Authors and Appalachian Literary Traditions. Annie Merner Pfeiffer Library. Web.  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