Map Home

In the poem that opens this career-spanning odyssey, a blind weaver, who is at once a grandmotherly Penelope and a Homeric bard, “maps you home”—home finally, as the concluding poem reveals, to the Swamp Fox-haunted lowlands of Havird’s native South. Along the way, which threads through Hardy’s Wessex, the Greece of Homer and Seferis, and Jack London’s Valley of the Moon, we take our bearings in “elliptical” terrain, as Rosanna Warren describes the typical setting—landscapes through whose gaps emerge the ghosts of memory and myth to engage the living in scenes of infinite moment. 

In Map Home, as in Havird’s award-winning chapbook, Penelope’s Design—but amply here—“the memories of ‘a dream-disheveled child’ in the Deep South unfold,” as Eleanor Wilner observes, “into the meditative travels of the literary man in elegant poems riddled with starlight.”

David Havird grew up in Columbia, South Carolina, and studied at the University of South Carolina under James Dickey.  He completed his graduate studies at the University of Virginia with a doctoral dissertation on Thomas Hardy.  While not a prolific poet, he has published for many years in major journals, having broken into print in 1975 with a poem in The New Yorker.  His collection of fourteen poems, Penelope’s Design (2010), won the 2009 Robert Phillips Poetry Chapbook Prize.  He lives in Shreveport, Louisiana, where he teaches at Centenary College.