Let’s Call It Home
— Cascade Books
Praise for Let’s Call It Home:
“Let’s Call It home, is a deft, delicate, carefully assembled collection of poems, each a giving a focus and an insight of its own, but altogether intended to take you on a slow journey, an ascent and descent, a venturing out and a return, But as Eliot also knew, ‘the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time’. Time and again these poems do what poetry does best: they transfigure the familiar and so reveal something of its meaning: from the child crawling inch by inch towards a patch of light on the floor to the man holding the body of God inexplicably in his hand, from the mystery of the earthworm rising towards the rain, to the family who find that feeding a child pureed peas is an entirely sacramental act, in poem after poem Luke Harvey gives us a glimpse of what George Herbert called ‘Heaven in Ordinary’.’ — Malcolm Guite
“Luke Harvey’s poetry reminds me of my younger and more compassionate self. His work is more cannily colloquial, more expansively gracious than my own. These are actual poems, shaped by a truly faithful heart and mind in search of truth. May it be blessed.” —Scott Cairns
“Luke Harvey’s poetry is the book of his own life, in which he observes himself writing. A master of guileful word play, Harvey’s poetic skill with the way words on the page play against each other make this riveting reading. These are poems vivid with details of family dynamics. His gentle but pointed observations come across as prismatic as life itself, his verbiage dense, rich, and spare in defining the earthbound edges of life.” —Luci Shaw
Among the poems in Let’s Call It Home are radiant moments—many of them—that remind us why we live, how we love, and what hope is for in this world so often weary to the bone. Here are poems that celebrate what it means that we live “balancing on what we have / while reaching for what we don’t, / imagining our careful way across / the wide floor-plan of our sojourn.” Here are poems that remind us that we can sing our lament—and still rise to praise, because when all is said and done, our work—as Luke Harvey reminds us here—is to “settle here, grow acclimated / with the presence which pervades.” Here are poems that seem both home-spun and finely woven, like a rich tapestry made of ordinary life and extraordinary passion.” — Mark S. Burrows
