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- "A Several-Acre Space of Tenderness"--new essay today at Poetry Foundation's This Be the Place Series
"A Several-Acre Space of Tenderness"--new essay today at Poetry Foundation's This Be the Place Series
Han VanderHart
July 14, 2025
an aerial photograph of my family’s pond from Google maps
“This Be the Place is a series of short essays in which poets explore the mysteries and meaning of a particular place.”
I have a new essay out today in the This Be the Place series at Poetry Foundation, edited by Jeremy Lybarger. I wrote about the solace (and abandonment) of the pond I grew up beside on my family’s ten acres in Virginia—along with C.D. Wright, Linda Gregg, a little Agnes Varda, et al—and you can read it here: “A Several-Acre Space of Tenderness.”
The end of the essay references Larks, so for readers of Larks, I hope it deepens the landscape of the poems, and for those who haven’t read Larks, maybe this will encourage you to pick up a copy at your library or bookstore.
In the summer, the pond was a riot: electric green duckweed crept in from its edges, frogs laid their clouds of eggs and circled through their tadpole lifecycles, and the sounds of the pond—oh, the stereo sounds: frog song, cicadas, crickets in the grasses. The trees circling the pond held the singers.
‘The deeper the evening the louder the singing,’ observes the listener in C.D. Wright’s poem ‘Ponds, In Love,’ and I trust Wright for those lines (and for so many others). We are in a deep evening now; I was in a deep evening then. The pond and the pond’s singers—they exist, and sing.
Hope you are resting and caring for yourselves and each other as best you can during this long summer,
Han