Watermark: Poems

Description:

Hardin's poems invite us to wake to the mystery all around us, to time's revelatory unfolding, and to how our minds might find healing if only we listened intently enough to hear "the intercessions / made on our behalf."

Brief description: Jeff Hardin is the author of six previous collections of poetry, most recently A Clearing Space in the Middle of Being, No Other Kind of World, and Small Revolution. His work has been honored with the Nicholas Roerich Prize, the Donald Justice Poetry Prize, and the X. J. Kennedy Prize. Originally from Savannah, Tennessee, he has taught for almost three decades at Columbia State Community College in Columbia, Tennessee.

Review Quotes: In Watermark, his seventh collection, Jeff Hardin continues his project of retrieving shreds of grace from the dusty corners of ache and want. With an attention to form as original and incisive as Mary Szybist's, and with a sense of wonder as far-reaching as Wendell Berry's, he spins out poems that have a timeless quality-like the hand stitching of a nine-patch quilt, or congregational singing from a shape-note hymnal, or the eternity-flung stanzas George Herbert left behind. Jeff Hardin's poems are vessels of wisdom and truth.

-Bobby Rogers, author of Paper Anniversary and Social History

For years, Jeff Hardin's captivating, spiritually engaged poems have revealed the resonant beauty of the natural world and celebrated the labor of metaphysical striving. Watermark's lyrically rewarding poems provide a "whispered prayer" that tracks Hardin's deliberations and debates with luminous companions-Yeats, Whitman, Hopkins, Dickinson, Oliver, the Four Evangelists, U2, John Mellencamp, and more. This poet's restless intellect pays tribute to "the shape of thought, /how it shimmers and stretches/and cannot lie still," examining the legacy of personal loss, family trauma, and the "murky depths" of faith. Hardin, a master craftsman, brings into view "the glimpsed-forth/shining/of one thing seen/through the presence/of another.

-Jane Satterfield, author of Apocalypse Mix