How is it that a slim collection of poems about home and family feels somehow revolutionary?
Sarah Reardon’s debut collection, Home Songs (Wipf and Stock, 2025) traces a quiet, reflective, and deceptively “ordinary” journey from the dream of love to a marriage, the bearing and nurturing of children, and the cultivation of committed familial and social relationships—except that there is nothing ordinary about any of this anymore. In a culture that prizes autonomy and “freedom” above all, are we even supposed to desire these things?
Many of us have “no desire for where [we] are,” which is in the midst of “unpeopled” but “tidy” rooms “where deathless shadows loom.” Our homes, like our lives, have been hollowed out by isolation, atomization, and a consumer approach to everything, even our closest relationships.
In response, this sequence of poems attempts to nourish in us good longings, ones we’ve almost forgotten or have discredited. The ubiquitous wreckage and the failures-on-its-own-terms of the sexual revolution have some beginning to look back and wonder if there is another way we might live, one in which relationships can truly flourish. Is marriage really meant to be only “two successful careerists in the same bed,” as Wendell Berry has critiqued it in its modern Western form? The idea that marriage and home might mean anything greater—that is, have an inherent and deeper meaning and purpose in themselves—has been long eclipsed in Western society. We’ve been taught to view marriage and even children with a consumer mindset that forecloses the possibility of self-limitation or sacrifice.
Then along comes this small book of poetry. Reardon doesn’t preach. Instead, she leads us to inhabit the hearts and minds of her poetic personae as they dream of love and acknowledge the necessity of submission, rejoice in the delights of early intimacy and acknowledge the ordinariness of working at building a home, pray for an unborn child and fear the future possibility of death and broken familial relationships. Rather than a reductionist, consumeristic account of marriage and family, we begin to envision the creative and generative possibilities of “home.” Consumption is conspicuously absent.
After the opening “[call] to beauty” (in “The Introduction”), which casts a vision for the reader of the possibility of a rich home and feast, both in this life and in the life to come, we experience the puzzling sensation of simultaneously finding a dream lover and “[acquiring] the heart to bend,” that is, to learn submission to that lover. We learn that our “promised homeland” is not necessarily the one we sought, but the one accepted as both gift and rest—and imperfect. We’re startled by the idea of a wedding ceremony as containing both “joy and doom.” Doom? Why doom? Because marriage and parenthood require that we sometimes die to ourselves, our desires, our preferences. This is the hard truth we’ve rejected. The honeymoon period of early delight will end, we’re told, but in the process of accepting the seasons of a marriage, we will “learn what does, and what does not, grow old.” This is hope, hope that coheres with reality and holds onto transcendence.
The title poem, “Home Song,” is deceptively simple in its sing-song iambic trimeter and mostly monosyllabic words. Yet the reader is pulled quickly into a dream of home, hearth, children, hospitality, music, dancing, and feasting—a dream inspired by the sad sight of an empty room. The speaker moves from possibilities (“the stool could sit a man”; “the little ones would dance”) to certainties (“these very floors / Will rumble rich with feet”; “it will / By grace, in time, be full”). The vision creates the reality.
The syntax and diction of many of these poems might take a little settling into, because they subtly hearken back to archaic and mythic language. But the language fits the theme and purpose of the volume, which is to remind us of the ancient roots of the goods and desires common to most peoples throughout all of history: marriage, raising children, committing and belonging to a particular place and culture, and living with meaning and purpose in the context of a larger story. We can’t take for granted anymore that these are considered objective goods.
These are poems of real hope, real love, and real surrender. They call us to the long journey of becoming a beautiful, rooted person who cultivates beautiful, rooted relationships. We need to recover a vision for this. This vision is grounded in the paradox that kneeling, submission, and surrender in the context of covenantal relationships lead to true freedom and flourishing, both individually and communally. Wendell Berry illustrates it this way:
From their joining, other living souls come into being, and with them great responsibilities that are unending, fearful, and joyful. The marriage of two lovers joins them to one another, to forebears, to descendants, to the community, to heaven and earth. It is the fundamental connection without which nothing holds, and trust is its necessity.
Home is something we both receive and make. Can we, with fear and trembling, work at making a center that will hold? It will take courage, creativity, and a long obedience in the same direction. Home forms us as we form it. Is this rich and multifaceted vision of home still possible? Is a home like this still possible—a place to love and serve and practice hospitality and bear children and tell stories and feast and make music together?
If it is, it will happen because we catch this vision and begin to act upon it. How else but in small acts and decisions will we allow the vision to form us, and in so doing, come into being? Home means something—more than we realize. Today it is a “place perhaps not far but hard to find.”
Of course, our homes here on earth, as good and fruitful as they may become, teach us to yearn for a final home. If we accept the bitter and the sweet, the proximate good, and the deep work that submission to another in love can accomplish in us, then we can “sing within our station” now. And we’ll be better fit, Reardon says in the collection’s last poem, for that city,
. . . strong as cedar and as green,
For fairer country, higher ground, or home.
To those who circle not, but bend their knees—
Theirs is the better land, the mountain breeze.
Image Credit: Pierre Bonnard, “Table Set in a Garden” (c. 1908) via The National Gallery of Art.
