Home Songs

“In one of my favorite poems in this collection, Sarah Reardon reflects on Vergil’s Aeneid through the eyes of Lavinia, Aeneas’s promised bride. ‘Here seek, here find—this, your promised homeland.’ Reardon presents beautiful visions of home as a place filled with love, people, and promises. Poem after poem reasserts: This home—on earth, in this life—is but a foretaste. It is not our ultimate delight, but what a delight it still is!”

Nadya Williams

“In these well-crafted lines, Sarah Reardon finds the rhymes between biblical and mythic narratives of home and the particular, twenty-first-century realities of marriage, birth, and housework. She thus shows our dusty, makeshift dwellings to be icons of our eternal home. These poems to be shared and savored invite readers home, ‘a place perhaps not far but hard to find.’”

Jeffrey Bilbro

“From the large ecstasy of the Song of Songs, to the ‘patient,’ piety-seeking women of the Bible and classical literature, to the world of the present in which marriage is “’a ceremony of great joy and doom,’ the poems in Sarah Reardon’s Home Songs, with their careful attention to formal craft, acknowledge a world full of alienation and grief, yet lit with grace—an earthly homeland in which all humanity dwells in exile.”

Sally Thomas

“These poems are truly song-like. Whether sonnets or blank verse or some other meter, they draw on the resources of tradition and yet do so with supple ease. A new wife and new mother, Sarah Reardon is remarkably insightful as she meditates on the homes we find, the homes we make, and the home we long for. These poems are indeed ‘bright words pointing home.’”

Eric Potter