In an interview with the literary magazine Change Seven, current West Virginia poet laureate Marc Harshman shares that “Place is hugely important to me, it’s almost salvific.”
To that end, readers of his latest collection, “Dispatch From the Mountain State,” will find a depth of emotional insight concerning his sometimes misunderstood state. This not only rings true, but transforms these 108 pages into an exploration of experience only poetry can bring to the surface for examination.
It’s a book full of small moments writ large that come to feel grounded as walking barefoot in the yard, grass between the toes.
Harshman, a Hoosier State native, now a long-transplanted and much-lauded Wheeling resident, interacts throughout “Dispatch From the Mountain State” with both the natural and manmade landscapes of West Virginia by trying to “re-see” them in a way that becomes transformative.
The former Yale Divinity School graduate has a knack for finding the redemptive anywhere his eye lands, while namechecking places like Beech Bottom, Moundsville, and Romney Road.
His talent lies in keeping focus on the imagistic, foregoing the dogmatic or abstract which might lead readers astray. Instead, what might be heard in Harshman’s voice are whispers from other Appalachian writers like Maggie Anderson as well as some of the Black Mountain College magic.
In “Reminders,” we find the speaker noticing a squirrel “loping the high wire / over Main Street, Elkins, West Virginia. / A purple hairstreak meanders about a mistletoe/ slumbering in an elm. / And me, I’m following a coal truck/ disgorging black smoke as I head north. /…it is what it is, a small town in Appalachia.”
The poem pivots to a twisty list, following the thread of a conversation between friends, the subjects bouncing from “Coltrane, let’s say, / or Ravel, string bands, first beers, / first kisses, first deaths,” before lingering “on the men in orange suits… / lifting the perfect smell/ of new mown grass — bless them.”
But the poem continues toward its destination: “this song / for this small town in the lost mountains / of this deranged country.” In the end, what might save us all is “the little men / the little butterflies, the little squirrels, / all doing what they do, perhaps, even, // all any of us ever can.”
In the title poem, we’re told “nothing/ goes to waste in the heart of Appalachia.” This holds true as the speaker lists moments of neighbor helping neighbor as, “enough for which to be thankful, even this, / these little gestures that can re-birth a nation, / reconcile not only colors / like black and white, / like blue and red, / but reconcile us / one to the other.”
Harshman well understands the stakes of this political era but also understands that objectification and stereotypes can be offset by the empathy of citizens seeing humanity and serving each other. A wise prescription, indeed.
In “Wake,” the speaker is aware of the deeply felt loss of a Grandmother, “seeing her in the kitchen” where “The Ball glass jars sit empty under the window / where she watched her sparrows and what once / must’ve been a rose-breasted grosbeak, he r/ black-suited boy with the heart on his chest— / took us years to figure out what she’d seen.”
Instead of the small talk and platitudes of these post-funeral gatherings, the speaker instead wants to be alone “unless you can tell/ one of her stories, and then / I’ll know she lives / and that you’re allowed / in here where I’ve determined / what must go / on keeping her alive.”
Harshman’s use of enjambment adds a sense of tension, sometimes unexpected, to lines that land just as they ought to.
The fingerprints of Harshman’s knowing tone runs through a well-paced and lively “Dispatch From the Mountain State,” where, like some of us, he’s “settled at the same address, at home/ with the familiar losses still / astonishing me.”
Fred Shaw is a visiting lecturer in creative writing at the University of Pittsburgh.
First Published: May 11, 2025, 8:30 a.m.