Marc Harshman

Poet Laureate of West Virginia (2012-Present)

Marc Harshman’s Woman in Red Anorak (Lynx House Press) won the Blue Lynx Prize. His fourteenth children’s book, Fallingwater: The Building of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Masterpiece (co-author, Anna Egan Smucker) was published by Roaring Brook / Macmillan. He is co-winner of the 2019 Allen Ginsberg Poetry Award, and his poem “Dispatch from the Mountain State” was printed in the 2020 Thanksgiving edition of the New York Times. Dark Hills of Home was published by Monongahela Books in 2022 to celebrate his tenth anniversary as Poet Laureate of West Virginia. He has recently been commissioned to write a poem to celebrate the 40th anniversary of NPR’s Mountain Stage. 

Praise for following the silence

Marc Harshman’s brilliant new volume, Following the Silence, recalls the great Cesare Pavese’s observation: “The surest, and the quickest, way for us to arouse the sense of wonder is to stare, unafraid, at a single object. Suddenly—miraculously—it will look like something we have never seen before.” Indeed, a key “wonder” of Harshman’s poems—over decades of writing that have spun myriad wonders—has been his unflinching, forensic contemplation of those nearly missed luminous moments where revelation most profoundly resides. Harshman is a poet of the second, the moment, the hour. His memory configures in flashing, often blinding, images and incantatory, spellbinding language—sotto voce, yet thunderous: “just look / at those stars, just look / at your grandmother’s salt and pepper shakers, / how still they are, how reverent, fine, and perfect.” In Harshman’s economy, the miraculous reveals itself in the daily offices of being alive, of “just [looking]”: the sacramental transformation of “salt and pepper shakers” into objects of veneration, every bit as mysterious, and beyond human ken, as “stars.” The mighty silence of Following the Silence knells praise long after it is closed. Take your time with this grand book. Marc Harshman writes devotedly—all the way down to the syllable. Listen carefully.

—Joseph Bathanti, North Carolina Poet Laureate (2012-2014) and author of Land of Amnesia

Marc Harshman’s “words [chase] after/ each other with the ease of old friends,” delighting us as they capture the human and natural world: “the quiet/ dance of this yard-sticked afternoon,” a “thin wavering wrinkle of light,” “an old man numbering his grudges.” Following the Silence is a remarkable meditation on class, place, love, and legacy. In “These Days,” we encounter “the arrogant fragments / of morality.” The poems in this collection are, by contrast, modest fragments of mortality. How lucky we are that Harshman has chiseled so many words free.

—Erin Murphy, author of Assisted Living and Taxonomies

In his expansive new collection, Following the Silence, Marc Harshman gathers the visible world into crisp focus, and brings the invisible world as close to the light as it will bear. The mythic lives in the everyday, and those who have passed on before still feel very much alive in these poems. Harshman’s beloved West Virginia may be the homeplace of this work, but the images are just as rich anywhere the poet situates them. In this new volume, as in all his poetry, Harshman pays fine attention to the natural world, and an old moon and a single heron feel as closely observed as the blue ash and the reindeer moss. Though the poems carry much loss and caution, they offer an equal measure of wit and hopefulness: “See the rolling acres of pink flowers, / the gray clouds of birds, their hovering? / Begin believing you can.” The silences in these poems are vast, and yet they beckon the reader forward, with a music all their own.

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

Praise for Marc Harshman

Believe What You Can overflows with rich lines and vivid images, as the poet laureate of West Virginia speaks to classic concerns of loving the land, struggling to thrive, and holding on to what can be believed.

—Ron Houchin, author of The Man Who Saws Us In Half

These rich, beautiful poems are so close to the natural world that you can almost feel the wet stones and moss on your hands and hear bird song and mountain streams in the intricate music of the lines. Marc Harshman draws an intelligent, precise map of one small, rural place by taking as his reliable guide a love of naming: “hay stubble,” “branch-twined shadows,” “khaki-plated grasshoppers,” “world of wings!”

—Maggie Anderson, author of Windfall:  New and Selected Poems, Pitt Poetry Series

Marc Harshman writes a poetry of bonds, bonds between individuals, between families and communities, between the past and present.  In his poems the mythic and the folkloric often swirl around the everyday. They are poems of clear-eyed witness and unexpected connections, of relish and humor, and sometimes the macabre, even the uncanny.  Harshman celebrates the local and personal as it touches the larger world, in vivid portraits, rituals that define our lives. I admire the authenticity of both the voice and the vision.

—Robert Morgan, author of Terroir