Coming into an Inheritance

Praise for Jeff Hardin

” ‘…So often anything returned to is an absence weighed / against a self the self no longer is nor cares to be. / A sparrow, steering skyward, stalls the present tense.’ In these quiet descriptive/meditative poems, Jeff Hardin questions experience: what is a voice, what are words, what is a day? He offers readers a wealth of opportunities to meander in the company of tutelary spirits—birds, rivers, trees, Dickinson, Issa, Stafford, and Bach, among others—seeking ever deeper wonder, ‘to touch existence on the face’ rather than achieve resolution. This is a book of refreshment for a turbulent time.”

– Claire Bateman, author of Wonders of the Invisible World

“The poems in Jeff Hardin’s Coming into an Inheritance, skyscrapers tethered by trapeze, wheel within their structural constraints freely and with fervor. This book—this poet—is indispensable, as these quasi-sonnets splinter our mutual malaise into ecstatic beauty. Hardin surveys out his window, seeks ‘a way to stand inside a silence that erases me.’ Silence, for this poet, is our holy grail; utterance, then, is what dams the cup. These flawless poems seek not answers but ‘a word, then quiet, then what’s after that.’ ”

– Gary McDowell, author of Aflame 

“Jeff Hardin’s Coming into an Inheritance offers a vison of poetry so filled with warmth, so generous in spirit, that to read the book is to experience the waters where Robert Frost promises we may ‘drink and be whole again without confusion.’ Hardin’s poems embrace paradox, perplexity, and fulfillment as equal stations on the journey—in one poem, the speaker says, ‘I love a song whose only word, repeated, is ‘rejoice.’/All my favorite words are variations on this theme.’ There is also a special pleasure, a sense of accumulation, in seeing a poet find a form that seems the perfect container for their meanings as Hardin has done with his tercet-lined poems of five stanzas each. Galway Kinnell said that ‘The secret title of every good poem could be Tenderness,’ and Jeff Hardin gives us a full-hearted confirmation of this sentiment in Coming into an Inheritance.”

– Jesse Graves, author of Merciful Days and Tennessee Landscape with Blighted Pine