Arts
By Pablo Tanguay
Fall Sanctuary
By Jeff Hardin (Storyline Press, 63 pp., $14)
Poet Jeff Hardin believes in a fallen world, and he is grateful for it. Had Eve not succumbed to the snake, had she not tasted the forbidden fruit and convinced Adam to do the same, none of us would be here today to witness the rising of the sun or a winter's first frost or any other of the glorious phenomena Hardin has made it his life's work to lyricize and contemplate. The concept of the Fortunate Fall is central to Hardin's work, which is a poetry of praise for the earth, its languages and what they bestow: "All day, it seems, I wait for the clean, crisp sound / of apples bitten into, that lust-intake of trellis-juices."
Born and raised in Savannah, Tenn., and educated at Austin Peay State University and the University of Alabama, Hardin is an associate professor of English at Columbia State Community College. He has been writing poems for 25 years and publishing them for 18. Recently, he won the Nicholas Roerich prize, a national award considered one of poetry's most prestigious: Hardin's book beat out more than a thousand other manuscripts. With the Roerich came the publication of his first full-length collection, the appropriately titled Fall Sanctuary.
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Grateful Words: Jeff Hardin
As Mark Jarman, an English professor at Vanderbilt and this year's judge of the Roerich, points out in the book's introduction, Hardin's dominant theme here is gratitude. And in poem after poem, Hardin pushes the theme. In "This Earth We Walk Upon," he writes: "I'm in awe of brief time and its generosities, / to which I reach and can't-help-myself plunder"; in "After So Long Taking the Same Road," he "feels redeemed to be on earth"; and of "The Poet Who Never Achieved," Hardin writes: "No matter—words abide. / Even the ones put down so brief renew / the world somehow...."
It is work to find a negative sentiment in Fall Sanctuary. Even when evil does flash its gleaming fangs to leave human beings shaken, Hardin is quick to locate refuge. In the collection's opening poem, "In Fear and Trembling," which is a fine example of Hardin's poetic gifts and his spiritual outlook, the speaker acknowledges badness in the world, then comes close to admonishing those who dwell on it. After advising us to "Believe in joy, the fullness of it. / Perceive each hour as a threshold," the speaker says:
I'm not naive enough to think that this
would be the end of our remorse.
There'd still be women on the streets
pulling shawls about them in the freezing cold.
Hitler would have set aside his paint brush anyway.
We cannot halt a record week of touch-downs
on the plains, houses obliterated,
unread letters strewn a hundred miles away.
But the fact a voice can speak a language
and be understood by someone else
is itself incomprehensible, and surely evidence
of compassion that exists outside ourselves.
Or do we just prefer this fallen world,
where we strive against the other's interests
and guard ourselves and know that we're alone?
Hardin's is a poetry against despair. Not only is nature's endless beauty reason to rejoice, but language itself can transcend. In the most touching poem in Fall Sanctuary, "To Lorca," the speaker talks beyond the grave to the great Spanish poet Federico Garcia Lorca, who was murdered in 1936 by the Nationalists at the beginning of Spain's civil war. "To Lorca" is Hardin's proof that language is "evidence / of compassion that exists outside ourselves." The poem, in its entirety:
I'm told you passed a summer residence
for children when they took you to your death.
It comes, I know, as little recompense,
but I've prayed for you and wondered, when breath
no longer held, if those who stood above
their still-warm guns could smell the olive grove.
I'd like to think they turned—a whisper?—dared
the shadows, the sky, looked to where you stared.
But you and I—far-fetched—already were
in conversation across the years. No way
to silence that. In my room, on display,
your words still meet a harsher world with gestures
it reviles. I'd call them mine, if that could
cause the guards to take their eyes from where you stood.
No way to silence that. Not with guns or the armies that shoot them. Despite our best efforts to thwart it, the poet says, goodness is around us, is in us, and given the chance will reveal itself in even the direst circumstances. In another poem, "Breathing Exercise," he writes:
Someone has to point us toward the intimate. Someone needs
to know a harp's faint sound in the background when soldiers
start door to door. Oh why don't we admit we're exhausted?
It takes great effort not to shout for joy when we see each other.
Hardin has published over 250 of his poems. In a recent interview, he was asked how many had been rejected. "I'm not sure," he said. "A thousand, maybe 1,200." And how did he handle so much rejection? "That's easy," he said. "If I get my poems back and a journal rejected them, that can mean only one thing: they didn't read them. That's what keeps me going. And don't you mess with my illusion. It's working for me."