The Whacking Stick
A boy with a long stick whacks the air.
What demon does he strike?
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Camaraderie of the Marvelous
In Camaraderie of the Marvelous, Dianna Henning immerses us in worlds of astonishing connections. These are poems where the marvelous occurs, when a “slivered wolf . . .” becomes a “heart’s centerpiece,” and where a summer river “spills salsa music.” In these poems, connections among people and animals and memories are all “reaching across . . .”…
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New England Farmhouse
Down from Bob Ovitt’s place, two sisters linger
at their clothesline to watch as the farmer’s two hundred
eighty-pound body is hoisted into a flatbed and then
driven in a scrawl of dust around the bend. -
The Tenderness House – New Edition
Henning has a very elegiac quality to her writing: death, crows, grief and longing. That probably could be said of most poetry, but in this case, there’s also a very subtle sense of self-ironizing awareness. For example, in “Jump-Off Joe Creek,” which examines the story behind the oddly named Oregon stream, Henning takes an inward turn: “but finally, / like Joe on the bridge, you must select / one life and hold it like flint underneath your tongue, / something made in the shape of an arrow.”