He Tasks Me 
Mark Ford
‘Home,’ Mary suggests in Robert Frost’s 1914 poem ‘The Death of the Hired Man’, ‘is the place where, when you have to go there,/They have to take you in.’ To which her husband, Warren, replies: ‘I should have called it/Something you somehow haven’t to deserve.’ Home is Marilynne Robinson’s third novel; published four years after Gilead and 27 years after her astonishing debut, Housekeeping, it explores with unsparing precision and the most delicate subtlety the implications of Frost’s rival definitions of the idea of home.
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Mark Ford’s collections of poetry are Landlocked and Soft Sift. He is a professor of English at University College London.
Other articles by this contributor:
Love and Theft · plagiarism
The Style It Takes · John Cale
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