Darkness Sticks to Everything: Collected and New Poems

by Tom Hennen, Jim Harrison (Introduction)

After this all-but-unknown poet was called an “American master” in a long, gorgeous review in The New York Times, Tom Hennen was finally "discovered," and his book became a poetry best-seller

“It’s hard to believe that this American master—and I don’t use those words lightly—has been hidden right under our noses for decades. But despite his lack of recognition, Mr. Hennen...has simply gone about his calling with humility and gratitude in a culture whose primary crop has become fame. He just watches, waits and then strikes, delivering heart-buckling lines.” —Dana Jennings, The New York Times



"As with Ted Kooser, Tom Hennen is a genius of the common touch. . . . They are amazingly modest men who early accepted poetry as a calling in ancient terms and never let up despite being ignored early on. They return to the readers a thousandfold for their attentions."—Jim Harrison, from the introduction



"Many readers will appreciate this evocation of a life not as commonly portrayed in contemporary verse."—Library Journal



"There is something of the ancient Chinese poets in Hennen, of Clare and Thoreau, although he is very much a contemporary poet."—Willow Springs

"One of the most charming things about Tom Hennen's poems is his strange ability to bring immense amounts of space, often uninhabited space, into his mind and so into the whole poem."—Robert Bly



"America is a country that loves its advertising. That loves its boxes we can put people and places into. We love 'Heartland' as opposed to 'Dustbowl.' We also love to be surprised. Rural Minnesota, as written by Tom Hennen in Darkness Sticks to Everything, is a world of realistic loneliness and lessons. It’s a collection of sincere poems about man and the land."—The Rumpus



"Hennen is a master of the prose poem [who] can take little details, tiny details and make them universal."—River Falls Journal

"What separates Hennen from many of his contemporaries is his willingness to identify with the natural world in a way that feels neither possessive nor self-serving, but simply (once again) sincere."—Basalt Magazine



"There is something strong in all Tom Hennen's poems, an awareness and a clear, sure voice... I don't usually want to end by saying 'Buy this book,' but I'm going to say it this time: 'You should buy this book.'"—Fleda Brown, Interlochen Public Radio, "Michigan Writers on the Air"

Tom Hennen gives voice to the prairie and to rural communities, celebrating—with sadness, praise, and astute observations—the land, weather, and inhabitants. In short lyrics and prose poems, he reveals the detailed strangeness of ordinary things. Gathered from six chapbooks that were regionally distributed, this volume is Hennen's long-overdue introduction to a national audience. Includes an introduction by Jim Harrison and an afterword by Thomas R. Smith."In Falling Snow at a Farm Auction"

Straight pine chair
Comfortable
In anyone's company,
Older than grandmother
It enters the present
Its arms wide open
Wanting to hold another young wife.

Tom Hennen, author of six books of poetry, was born and raised in rural Minnesota. After abandoning college, he married and began work as a letterpress and offset printer. He helped found the Minnesota Writer's Publishing House, then worked for the Department of Natural Resources wildlife section, and later at the Sand Lake National Wildlife Refuge in South Dakota. Now retired, he lives in Minnesota.

Genres: Poetry, Nature

180 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2013

About the author

Born into a big Dutch-Irish family in 1942 in Morris, Minnesota, Tom Hennen grew up on farms. After abandoning college, he married and began work as a letterpress and offset printer in 1965. In 1972 he helped found the Minnesota Writers’ Publishing House, printing with a press stashed in his garage work that included his first chapbook, The Heron with No Business Sense. He worked for the Department of Natural Resources Wildlife Division in the 1970s and later worked as a wildlife technician at the Sand Lake National Wildlife Refuge in South Dakota. Now retired, he lives in St. Paul near his children and grandchildren.

Reviews

[s.penkevich [hiatus-will return-miss you all] · Rating 4 out of 5]

The beauty of the natural world often arrives in such ineffable glory that poetry seems the only way to even attempt to capture it in words. ‘The poetry of earth is never dead’ wrote John Keats in his poem On the Grasshopper and Cricket and in the works of rural poet Tom Hennen we see this promise kept and perpetuated through achingly lovely depictions of life amidst the fields, streams and trees of the upper midwest. Darkness Sticks to Everything: Collected and New Poems is a lovely little collection that follows Hennen’s poetic journey from his first chapbook, The Heron With No Business Sense, in 1974 up to his newest writings in the present, charting a poetic investigation of the natural world and our emotional resonance within it. It reads like a natural follow-up to the works of one of my favorite poets, Mary Oliver, though he is often compared to fellow Minnesotan poet Robert Bly (who arrives in English through Bly’s translations). ‘I know of no poet in the United States better informed on simple rural life,’ author and fellow poet Jim Harrison writes in his introduction, and the rural midwestern landscapes alight in the various seasons really struck me as the landscape of Minnesota and my home in Michigan aren’t all that dissimilar. Reading with a calm beauty and a bit of what I suppose amounts to old man rural wisdom, Darkness Sticks to Everything is a lovely collection.

Love for Other Things

It's easy to love a deer
But try and care about bugs and scrawny trees
Love the puddle of lukewarm water
From last week’s rain.
Leave the mountains alone for now.
Also the clear lakes surrounded by pines.
People are lined up to admire them.
Get close to the things that slide away in the dark.
Be grateful even for the boredom
That sometimes seems to involve the whole world
Think of the frost
That will crack our bones eventually.

The above poem really captures what makes Hennen’s poetry so delightful. It captures the sense of the small things in life, the little quiet moments of peace amidst the pines, the calm beneath a vast starry sky, the warmth of a breeze, and how appreciating these small details amalgamate to a large appreciation for life. Hennen excels at capturing the world in all its various decor, from autumn where a leaf ‘recalls a tongue and a voice / and a time when everyone could fly’ to spring where the return of warm and sun can appease seasonal sadness: ‘A piece of spring / pierced me with love for this empty place.’ I felt that. There is the glory of summer and all the animals around, where butterflies with ‘wings thin as gold foil’ gently flutter and land ‘carefully on a page / of the illuminated landscape of the earth.’ Which is a rather lovely metaphor for a field in bloom, I must admit. And his winter poetry felt very alive in my personal experiences as well. I love his playful metaphors, particularly those around snow, such as in Under a Dark Sky where he writes:

‘But one snowflake is weightless.
Like an empty thought
No two
Are exactly the same.’

Nature comes alive in his works. There are the noises of the night where ‘a tree / roars through town / without stopping,’ and life amid nature where we must consider that if a soul made a noise ‘it might sound like / small stones being hit together.’ Its poetry that brings a strong visual sense and reminds us of beauty. ‘Hennen is one of those poets we return to when we long to release what attracted us to poetry in the first place,’ Thomas R. Smith writes in his afterword to the collection, and I feel this would make for a great book to turn people towards who are looking for their early steps into poetry or already enjoy Mary Oliver and are looking for something similar. Smith says that while Hennen never writes about his own influences, there is definitely an affinity for the Chinese poets of the past that also influenced poets like Bly, Jim Harrison, and Ted Kooser who were among his contemporaries. Smith describes his style in this way as:

‘level, almost Taoist, with a tempered knowledge of self and world. Hennen avoids poetic fashion and speaks without pretension, though not unmusically, of an ancient way of being on and with the earth.’

Hennen can craft a poem in just a few short lines that contains multitudes in its implications. In this way, Robert Bly wrote in the introduction to Hennen’s 1993 collection, Love for Other Things, of Hennen’s‘strange ability to bring immense amounts of space, often uninhabited space, into his mind and so into the whole poem.’ Hennen also writes a lot of rather lovely prose poems, sturdy with a good heft and length though personally I prefer the shorter poems.

Picking a World

One world
Includes airplanes and power plants,
All the machinery that surrounds us,
The metallic odor that has entered words.

The other world waits
In the cold rain
That soaks the hours one by one
All through the night
When the woods come so close
you can hear them breathing like wet dogs.

I did find some charm in getting this one from the library because, as a fan of used books where people leave little notes or gift dedications on the title page that one can view as artifacts of a previous owner, I found the copy had one single dog eared page. And it turns out to be a poem I really love, one that seems to really capture the feeling of missing someone. I know its a feeling I’ve had. But with the final lines about the earth circling the post office, it felt like a poem that has been circling waiting for a reader to land on. I’m glad it was me. Here is the poem:

As I Write This Letter

I cannot wait for you any longer.
The warm breezes are gone.
The ripples in the water are frozen.
The forest is falling behind the rest of the landscape.
Snowflakes are messages sent
Into the cold night to keep you company
Until I arrive.
The earth is a letter circling the post office.
I am a foreign word scrawled on its surface.

A small but rather gorgeous collection, Darkness Sticks to Everything is a wonderful poetic embodiment of the American midwest landscape and the feelings of moving amongst it. Published by Copper Canyon Press, this is a very Copper Canyon Press vibe of a collection, and those who enjoy some good nature poetry or any of the aforementioned poets are sure to enjoy the calming works of Tom Hennen.

4/5

What the Plants Say

Tree, give up your secret. How can you be so satisfied? Why
don’t you need to change location, look for a better job, find
prettier scenery, or even want to get away from people?

Grass, you don’t care where you turn up. You appear running
wild in the oat field, out of a crack in a city street. You are
the first word in the vocabulary of the earth. How is it that you
are able to grow so near the lake without falling in? How can
you be so alert for the early frost, bend in the slightest breeze,
and yet be so hard to break that you are still there, quiet, green,
among the ruins of others?

Weed, it is you with your bad reputation that I love the most.
Teach me not to care what anyone has to say about me. Help me
to be in the world for no purpose at all except for the joy of
sunlight and rain. Keep me close to the edge where every wild
thing begins.

[Ken]

As a Midwestern poet, Tom Hennen is often paired in people’s minds with Ted Kooser. That is, if Hennen is in your mind in the first place. For me, he wasn’t because I'd never heard of him, and while his poetry is, like Kooser’s, plain-spoken, it is also so nature-centric that I cannot in good faith consider these two that similar. Related by geography and style at times, but different, too.

First and foremost, if you crave rapidly-disappearing nature as a topic in your poetry, Hennen is your man. By modern standards where identity serves as the new Garden of Poetic Eden, he is quaint with his love of the four seasons (especially autumn), trees (especially pines), earth (especially its sky) and so much more. This collection, encompassing some of his best work along with some new poesies, includes the early image poems, focused with great specificity on the landscape, as well as his wonderful collection of prose poems covering the same matter, called “Crawling Out the Window.”

If you are looking for comparisons, Hennen’s quiet army of fans are more than willing to provide them. The Ancient Chinese poets. Robert Bly. James Wright. Francis Ponge. The Scandinavian poets Olav H. Hauge, Harry Martinson, and Rolf Jacobsen. Imagery, personification, and folksiness work together to bring big surprises in small packages. As you read Hennen, his poems grow on you like moss on a tree. Slowly.

So let’s look and see, shall we?


Spring Follows Winter Once More

Lying here in the tall grass
Where it’s so soft
Is this what it is to go home?
Into the earth
Of worms and black smells
With a larch tree gathering sunlight
In the spring afternoon

And the gates of Paradise open just enough
To let out
A flock of geese.


Finding Horse Skulls on a Day That Smelled of Flowers

At the place where I found the two white skulls
Sunlight came through the aspen branches.
Under one skull were
Large beetles with hard bodies.
The other one
I didn’t move.
Around them new grass grew
Making the scent of the earth visible.
Where the sun touched shining bone
It was warm
As though the horses were dreaming
In the spring afternoon
With night
Still miles away.


Things Are Light and Transparent

During the fall, objects come apart when you look at them.
Farm buildings are mistaken for smoke among the trees.
Stones and grass lift just enough off the ground so that you
can see daylight under them. People you know become
transparent and can no longer hide anything from you.
The pond the color of the rainy sky comes up to both sides
of the gravel road looking shiny as airplane wings. From it
comes the surprised cry the heron makes each time it finds
itself floating upward into a heaven of air, pulled by the
attraction of an undiscovered planet.


The Life of a Day

Like people or dogs, each day is unique and has its own
personality quirks, which can easily be seen if you look
closely. But there are so few days as compared to people,
not to mention dogs, that it would be surprising if a day
were not a hundred times more interesting than most
people. Usually they just pass, mostly unnoticed, unless
they are wildly nice, such as autumn ones full of red maple
trees and hazy sunlight, or if they are grimly awful ones
in a winter blizzard that kills the lost traveler and bunches
of cattle. For some reason we want to see days pass, even
though most of us claim we don’t care to reach our last one
for a long time. We examine each day before us with barely
a glance and say, no, this isn’t one I’ve been looking for,
and wait in a bored sort of way for the next, when, we are
convinced, our lives will start for real. Meanwhile, this day
is going by perfectly well adjusted, as some days are, with
the right amounts of sunlight and shade, and a light breeze
perfumed from the mixture of fallen apples, corn stubble,
dry oak leaves, and the faint odor of last night’s meandering
skunk.


Like I said, nothing fancy here. Country wisdom by a man who can name things and who sees movement and life in ways that we don’t and in things that we don’t. Like a warm breeze in early spring, it is. If you’re a certain kind of “old soul” reader, that is.

[Julie · Rating 5 out of 5]

How can I tell you what a treasure this collection is, that you should set everything aside and make this your next devotional read, so that you'd believe me?

Spring Follows Winter Once More

Lying here in the tall grass
Where it's so soft
Is this what it is to go home?
Into the earth
Of worms and black smells
With a larch tree gathering sunlight
In the spring afternoon

And the gates of Paradise open just enough
To let out
A flock of geese.

The collection traces Hennen's work from 1974 to the late 2010s (the book was published in 2013) and it chronicles a man's attempt to honor the landscape that sustains him. These are poems of the rural Midwest, of its ice and heat, its birds and livestock, of small moments when the sky opens to sunlight or to snow. It is full of grace. As Jim Harrison says in the Introduction, "Hennen is poet of the way we used to be."

Tree, give up your secret. How can you be so satisfied? Why don't you need to change location, look for a better job, find prettier scenery, or even want to get away from people. From What the Plants Say

I have highlighted line after line, dog-eared so many poems that it seemed silly after awhile. It's the whole thing, each poem, treasures like the tiny eggs our hens recently started laying, nestled in the straw like so many fragile pearls.

There is a wonderful introduction by Jim Harrison that sets the collection in its place and time, and a beautiful homage to Tom Hennen by Thomas R. Smith at the end which goes much deeper into Hennen's work, his impact and legacy. He should be much better known, but Hennen never sought the limelight. He was a father, a husband, a man who put providing for his family above grasping at literary fame.

These are poems of place, of deep gratitude and reverence for weather, the seasons. They are timeless, and in an era when focus on self, identity, personal trauma is so in vogue, Hennen's work invites the outside in and explores what happens when the self is let go in appreciation of the greater world in which we all exist.

Before a Rain in Spring
The willow
Has a black trunk
Sticking up into the lifeless branches.
Thin as clouds
The branches
Swirl above the tree
They float off the ground
Like
The thousand frail thoughts
Of someone about to wake

A note: I am employed by Copper Canyon Press, the publisher of this collection, but all views expressed are entirely my own.

[Joseph · Rating 5 out of 5]

Some French writer when I was a boy said that the desert went into the heart of the Jews in their wanderings and made them what they are, I cannot remember by what argument he proved them even yet the indestructible children of earth, but it may well be that the elements have their children. If we knew the Fire-Worshippers better we might find that their centuries of pious observance had been rewarded, and that the fire has given them a little of its nature; and I am certain that the water, the water of the seas and of lakes and of mist and rain, has all but made the Irish after its image. Images form themselves in our minds perpetually as if they were reflected in some pool. We gave ourselves up in old times to mythology, and saw the gods everywhere. We talked to them face to face, and the stories of that communion are so many that I think they outnumber all the like stories of all the rest of Europe. Even to-day our countrypeople speak with the dead and with some who perhaps have never died as we understand death; and even our educated people pass without great difficulty into the condition of quiet that is the condition of vision. We can make our minds so still like water that beings gather about us that they may see, it may be, their own images, and so live for a moment with a clearer, perhaps even with a fiercer life because of our quiet. Did not the wise Porphyry think that all souls come to be born because of water, and that “even the generation of images in the mind is from water”?

—W. B. Yeats, “Earth, Fire and Water,” from The Celtic Twilight: Faerie and Folklore

I’m using Yeats as a touchstone because his voice—relaxed but precise, meditative, unobtrusively erudite—is much like the voice we find in Minnesota poet Tom Hennen’s Darkness Sticks to Everything: Collected & New Poems. What’s more, Hennen’s is a watery book, a flood of soulful, visionary images. He is a country person (or was: he lives now in St. Paul) and like the countrypeople Yeats mentions is sensitive to the elemental earth, its seasons and creatures, and these seem to speak through him; or better: his poems are in conversation with them. We overhear that conversation in Hennen’s poetry. He seldom speaks to us directly, and as a result his work seems utterly natural, devoid of rhetoric. Unlike so many poets winning prizes these days, his work has the fragrance of black north country soil, not the carbolic odor of academe.

The world according to Hennen is one in which the human grasp exceeds its reach: we think we are taking control, farming the land, building our homes with their 100-watt lamps to hold back the night, but our grasp is finally not firm enough, the lights aren’t strong enough. Darkness sticks to everything.

*

I love collected poems, especially when discovering a new poet—and Hennen is completely new to me. We find him first in poems published in the mid-1970s. They are tentative in some ways, content to open up carefully circumscribed situations:

Out of Work More Than a Year Still No One Answers My Letters of Application

I late winter
Afternoon sunlight
Doesn’t budge the snowbanks
That have fallen whole into the backyard.

A forecast for more cold.
On the edge of the roof
Icicles are in deep conversation.
I pretend I belong and start talking.

There’s that water! Locked up in snowbanks, slowly dropping from the eaves. But there’s more cold in the forecast. A bleak but beautiful moment.

There is also a quiet humor in Hennen’s work that makes it especially appealing in these days of hyper-clever, grad-school in-joke poetry. It’s there early on, but begins to surface more frequently on his 1983 book Looking into the Weather:

Independent Existence

A small pond comes out of the hillside.
On its surface
Hangs a frog imitating moss.
A willow leaf
Drops on the water
And is immediately still.
Autumn air penetrates the ground.
Wind hums endlessly
To the tangled grass.
When things happen here
There is no urge to put them on TV.

Impossible to read that without smiling! And yet ... the poem seems to have very modest ambitions. I wouldn’t call that a character flaw, but that modesty was part of Hennen’s early poetic character, and it limited the scope of his work.

Which may be why a decade passed before Hennen published his next collection, Love for Other Things, where we find his poetry opening outward. The landscapes are more capacious, the contexts more expansive:

Picking a World

One world
Includes airplanes and power plants,
All the machinery that surrounds us,
The metallic odor that has entered words.

The other world waits
In the cold rain
That soaks the hours one by one
All through the night
When the woods come so close
you can hear them breathing like wet dogs.

This is not just a moment, but the portrait of a condition—physical and spiritual, personal and national. It’s also, I imagine, a sly riposte to William Carlos Williams’ dictum of 1944 (in his preface to his collection The Wedge) that “a poem is a small (or large) machine made of words.” No, Hennen says, quietly but firmly, a poem is not a machine, and the idea that it is has sullied our very language with a “metallic odor.” Real poems come from “the other world,” the non-human world where nature (“the woods”) comes close full of shivering affection, like a wet dog. This kind of complexity appears in Hennen’s early work only fragmentarily, in flashes, and it isn’t until his 1997 volume Crawling Out the Window that Hennen breaks out formally by embracing the prose poem form.

Wisconsin poet and editor Thomas R. Smith, whose most recent editorial effort is the amazing Airmail: The Letters of Robert Bly and Tomas Tranströmer, states in his Afterword to Hennen’s book that “Crawling Out the Window is one of the greatest prose poem collections written by an American,” and I think his assessment is indisputable. When we arrive at Hennen’s prose poems we see the poet fully come what Yeats called “the condition of vision. “ There is a new kind of layering, a new imagistic dimensionality, a fresh music that his lined poems simply couldn’t accommodate. Prose seems to have released Hennen in some way, giving him access to the full scope of his emotional, intellectual, and spiritual impulses. The title poem is a good example:

Crawling Out the Window

When water starts to run, winds come to the sky carrying parts of Canada, and the house is filled with the scent of dead grass thawing. When spring comes on the Continental Divide, the snowbanks are broken in two and half fall south and half fall north. It’s the Gulf of Mexico or Hudson Bay, one or the other for the snow, the dirt, the grass, the animals, and me. The Minnesota prairie has never heard of free will. It asks you, quietly at first, to accept and even love your fate. You find out that if you fall south, life will be easy as warm rain. You wake up with an outgoing personality and a knack for business. The river carries you. You float easily and are a good swimmer. But if you fall north while daydreaming, you never quite get your footing back again. You will spend most of your time looking toward yourself and see nothing but holes. There will be gaps in your memory and you won’t be able to earn a living. You always point north like a compass. You always have to travel on foot against the wind. You always think things might get better. You watch the geese and are sure you can fly.

It’s incredibly exhilarating to watch Hennen achieve mastery in these poems and in those gathered here in the “New Poems” section, where the work ranges from small but luminous lined poems like this one, worthy of Bashō:

An Autumn Gift

Red maple leaves
Like just so
In the tall faded grass.
Happy to do it.

To this one, my favorite of all his many water poems:

Minnows II

It seems nature has many clocks, all running at once, set to different times. Some are as big as Wyoming, some the size of a nameless creek. If you listened closely, the minnows were black seconds ticking, and it’s hard, but I caught one. In the palm of my hand it jumped and tickled and nibbled my skin so I was amused and a bit scared because I was sure that seconds must not be kept from ticking. And anyhow, it had already escaped back into the icy creek. The day was warm and thick as violets. I wondered if I should tell someone what I had been bitten by time and it wasn’t so bad.

Notice the shift from present to past in this meditation on time, the purposeful narrowing of the view from landscape to creek, the minnow’s escape that happens while the poet is distracted by his own thinking. and then the enlarging of the view to encompass the whole day, and the final observation about what it means to be “bitten by time.” There is no way of knowing, of course, but I imagine that the early Tom Hennen, the young poet of the ‘60s and ‘70s, would have begun this poem with the third sentence and ended it with the minnow’s escape. What he has learned in his years of mindful practice—not through theory, not in the classroom—is to give his poems the space they need to breathe as the world breathes: deeply, joyfully, intimately.

Jim Harrison, one of the few living masters of both poetry and prose fiction, in his introduction to Darkness Sticks to Everything compares Hennen with Ted Kooser. Both poets, he observes, “are amazingly modest men who early accepted poetry as a calling in ancient terms and never let up despite being ignored early on. They return to the readers a thousand fold for their attentions.” Poetry as a calling, not an occupation; poetry as vision, not machine. These are the “ancient terms” Harrison praises, and rightly so. We need more poets like Tom Hennen, though in truth they are probably all around us. I’m hopeful that this powerful collection will inspire them to keep that ancient faith and inspire readers to seek them out and support them in their work.

[Peycho Kanev · Rating 5 out of 5]

С ОРЕОЛА НА ИСТИНСКИТЕ ПОЕТИ
"Мрак обгръща всичко" от Том Хенън

Като човек, който следи изкъсо американската литературна сцена, бях силно изненадан да науча за съществуването на добър американски поет от български издател. Името на поета е Том Хенън, а издателят е бутиковото издателство за поезия "Фрост". Бих казал, че това издателство върши страхотна работа, защото след книгите на големите американски поети Били Колинс, Тед Кусър, Карл Денис и Клаудия Емерсън сега ни предоставя възможността да се запознаем с книгата на Хенън "Мрак обгръща всичко". Двата двигателя зад издателството - преводачът Благовест Петров и оформителят на книгите Иво Рафаилов - отново са заработили в брилянтен синхрон, за да ни представят това поетично бижу.

Том Хенън е роден в Морис, Минесота, през 1942 г. Израснал е сред гъстите гори, сред безкрайните прерии на американския среден запад, дали най-дълбоко отражение на поезията му. Хенън е поет на природата, натуралист, повлиян в младите си години от друг голям поет Робърт Блай, но бързо открил своето собствено звучене, открил своето собствено място сред тази ширнала се безкрайност. Много пъти съм пътувал из тези земи и сега, четейки стиховете на Хенън, отново си представих онова разтеглено и огромно небе над земята на Минесота, онези тъмнозелени гори, които сякаш потъват в хоризонта, онзи кафяв цвят на земята там, който се набива дълбоко в очите. Том Хенън е израснал с тамошните гиганти - смерчовете, наблюдавал е как върховете им остъргват небето, скитал се е из прериите, в които за звуците няма прегради и те препускат на воля из пустошта, разговарял е с дъжда, вятъра, горските животни, със спечената пръст. И той се е превърнал в техен хроникьор; човекът, водещ дневника на природата. Много обичам тези поети, защото те ти дават надежда за едно спасение, пък било то и временно, от грубия бетон, метала и невъобразимия шум на града и те пренасят в една съвсем различна действителност, в която можеш да усетиш притегателната сила на природата, да видиш истинските, изчистени цветове на мирозданието, да потънеш в себе си. И много харесвам поетите, като Хенън, които не те "принуждават" да ги четеш, а някак си ефирно те приласкават да разтвориш страниците им и да не спираш, докато не достигнеш до последната. Неговата поезия е точно такава. Той уж говори за едни най-тривиални неща по един много простичък начин, но точно тук се усеща майсторското перо на талантливия поет. Дали пише за спускащата се нощ, за миризмата, вдигаща се от овцете след летния дъжд, за вятъра, свирещ сред листата на огромните дървета в мрачните гори, той те поставя сред всички тях, за да усетиш плътността им, да ги пипнеш и почувстваш върху кожата си. Той успява само с няколко кратки и пестеливи изречения да придаде тежест, дълбочина и красота на стихотворението си. Тук се усеща онова майсторство на древните китайски поети. Ето един пример, който по най-добрия начин илюстрира това мое виждане за вещината на този поет.

В СНЕЖНАТА ГОРА

Докато копая гроб
за старото женско куче,
пара се носи от земята
при всеки дъх.
Тук почвата
е песъчлива,
рохкава даже през зимата.
Ние всички имаме множество тела,
лесни за погребване.
Зад нас
годините една в друга се трият
и въздишат
сред върховете на боровете.
Единствено снегът, който пада,
не познава
тежестта на костите.

В същото време той успява да зареди с действие една напълно бездейна и банална картина, направлявайки погледа на читателя все по-навътре в стихотворението. Точно това се случва и тук.

РАБОТА ПО ДВОРА

Работя с греблото.
Водна змия
в краката ми.
Обезумял, с удари я убивам.

През остатъка от деня
прескачам
всяко листо.
Страхът се разгъва
и извива сред дълбоката пожълтяла трева.

А когато реши да хване четката и да нарисува една плътна и многопластова картина, Хенън го прави със замах и неподражаемо майсторство и то още от заглавието, което нахвърля първите ескизи върху платното.

В ПОЛЕТО СЪС ЗРЕЛИ ЖИТА

Разтваряйки внезапно ръката си,
с дръзкия избор
на древен разум,
скакалецът скача
в другото свое тяло,
това с черните крилца,
което го отнася до телта на оградата,
където енчецът се струпва
под обедното слънце,
отвъд способността ми да наранявам,
отвъд помощта ми
преди да мога да обясня значението
на думата зима.

Когато по-горе споменах древните китайски поети, такива като Ли Бай, Ду Фу, Су Ши и тяхното майсторство в кратката форма, говорех точно за това:

СТУД СРЕД ДЪРВЕТАТА

Крясъкът
на совата
е достатъчно необятен,
може да отнесе цяла овца.

Том Хенън може да опише една много приятна поетична картина и без да изпада в многословност, да прибягва до дълбоки метафори и изящни прийоми. Той просто дава възможност на читателя сам да усети природата, миризмите, цветовете...

НОЩ В БЛИЗОСТ ДО ЕЗЕРОТО

Дъждът тихо заваля с падането на мрака.
Студена вода
просмуква козината на дивите неща.
Навред - миризма на прогизнала дървесина.
Нощта се поклаща леко,
привързана към дока.

Докато пишех този текст, се разрових и в интернет, за да видя какво ще открия за този поет. Оказва се, че Том Хенън не е много познат и в родината си. Оказва се, че над него е мъждукал някакъв малък прожектор на славата, а според мен той заслужава голям ореол, какъвто имат истинските поети, защото той е поет на онази дълбока тишина, което можеш да чуеш само ако влезеш вътре в необятността на природата, ако докоснеш ствола на вековно дърво и ако се заслушаш в шептенето на тревата. Такива поети, за жалост, не са останали много на този свят.

http://liternet.bg/publish29/pejcho-k...

[Amy · Rating 5 out of 5]

I skimmed this before bringing it home and thought Hennen's writing seemed similar to that of Ted Kooser and Jim Harrison, and it is. I was pleased to find that Jim Harrison actually wrote the foreword to the book. This is such a great collection of poetry about nature--so many excellent observations arranged in an aesthetically pleasing way. Most is reverent, some is funny. If you like any of the above-named poets or Mary Oliver, you will like this collection.

[Byron Glick · Rating 5 out of 5]

Oh my. Page after page, poem after poem, Tom Hennen delivers the essence of things delicately wrapped in the tissue and old newspapers of his words. I constantly had the feeling of opening old boxes in the attic, wonder, mystery, and gratitude rising in the shafts of dusty sunlight.

I cannot think of any other writer who has so gently but definitely entered my list of best American writers....

[Janet · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wow, just wow. This is some of the most beautiful poetry and prose (combinations of both) that I have EVER read. I will never look at anything in nature with the same eyes again. Every selection contains some surprising imagery, some why-didn't-I-say-that phrase, so simple but so original and perfect. I just love this book.

[Naomi · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fine well-bodied poems that bring you in wonder through rain, snow, and sun.

[Nathan · Rating 5 out of 5]

The best.

[Michael Kocinski · Rating 5 out of 5]

Read these poems. Read these poems. Do yourself a favor and read these poems.

[Jeffrey (Akiva) Savett · Rating 5 out of 5]

So the "deal" with Hennen is that everyone describes him as an unheralded "Master" who has been toiling away publishing chapbooks and smaller collections.

I was surprised and thrilled and sad to find that description totally true. As I made my way through this Collected, I couldn't believe I hadn't read Hennen before and that he's not more well known than he is. He deserves to be. If that's what he wants. These poems warrant a large audience and can change your day or your life if you can internalize them.

Though I hate to compare poets based upon style, Hennen's eye for how the natural world speaks to our own psychology is every bit as refined, charming, and disarming as the poetry of Ted Kooser, Galway Kinnell, Robert Bly and the best of the Deep Image poets. As is the case in most superb collections, there are too many stellar lines and poems to pick and choose to share here. That said, some of my favorite poems are: "What the Plants Say," "Looking For The Differences," "The Life of a Day," and "Did I Say This Before?"

The last "poem" (for it is really sort of an epigraph) in particular is wonderful because it begins the book with some of the themes and images which Hennen will revisit time and time again in poem after poem, day after day, page after page, season after season. Each time, though, he comes away with a gem. Some vibration of holiness. So the answer to his rhetorical poem title is yes and no simultaneously and that's what makes Hennen great.

[jiji · Rating 5 out of 5]

I learned of Tom Hennen through the Writer's Almanac on my commute to work a few years ago, and was instantly intrigued. It was winter, and something about Hennen's attention to the small things made that early winter morning in my car more bearable. The poem I heard that morning was "Love for Other Things." The first four lines read: "It's easy to love a deer/But try to care about bugs and scrawny trees/Love the puddle of lukewarm water/From last week's rain." For reasons I can't fully articulate, I was moved by this poem, and bought his collected works that same day. It's the first and only book of poetry I've purchased.

I've picked up the collection from time to time since then, usually in winter when I'm experiencing a case of the winter blues. If Tom Hennen can survive decades of Minnesota winters (and write about them beautifully), I can make it through a comparatively mild Virginia winter! Hennen's poems are mostly short-ish reflections on nature. They aren't innovative, experimental, radical or particularly original, even. His language is simple and understated, but still, it transports you to the edge of an empty, frosted Minnesota field -- and makes you believe you are staring out at something beautiful and significant.

Hennen is a midwesterner from Minnesota, and reading his work, I imagine him as a quiet loner who silently observes and absorbs the tiniest details in the world around him. My favorite poems of his are subtle, slowly unfurling reflections on the starkness of the upper midwestern landscape in winter and late autumn; rereading these over the last few years has made my own Virginia winters less depressing. If you know the works of poets like Ted Kooser or Mary Oliver, his writing may feel familiar, but he is my favorite poet in this cannon.

The world Hennen writes about is not exploding with color or obvious beauty the way the American Southwest or mountains are; I think his talent is searching out the quiet beauty of the ordinary landscape. Hennen doesn't sugarcoat the cold or plainness of the Minnesota landscape; everything is what it is, but the way he writes and creates a sense of place makes me feel like there are tiny, beautiful natural things everywhere that deserve our attention just as much as nature's more ostentatious offerings. Maybe I'm going overboard, but I really feel like this collection allowed me to enjoy ordinary neighborhood walks in a way I wouldn't have been able to otherwise. It let me see past the boredom of routine and familiarity. I don't have to go somewhere special to be impressed anymore. I walk the same one-mile loop around my neighborhood for months at a time, and still enjoy seeing the same common suburban birds, trees, flowers and weeds over and over. Nature doesn't necessarily need to be extraordinary to be enjoyable.

I don't love all the poems in the collection, but I love enough of them to say this was $10 well spent.

[Dan Gobble · Rating 5 out of 5]

I purchased this collection of Hennen's poems over a year ago and set it aside for future reading. That was a mistake! Wow, I should have dove in right then. What a great volume! The back of the book has a 15 page biography of Hennen which reveals how he came to be a poet as well as some of his major influence (i.e, Robert Bly, James Wright, etc.).
I appreciated this poetry because Hennen includes lots images and scenes from agriculture (as opposed to agribusiness) as well as nature, among many other topics, subjects and images. If you enjoy authors such as Wendell Berry, Mary Oliver, Rolf Jacobsen, Ted Kooser, and Annie Dillard, I think you'll fall in love with Tom Hennen's work.
I especially liked the poems from the section taken from his 1997 volume titled "Crawling Out The Window".

A few of my favorite poems: (line breaks indicated with a /)

The One and Only Day

There has only ever been one day and it happens over and over. / No one knows where it came from. It slides through time, the / prow of a ship through sleeping water. It bumps against the / shore of daylight each morning and sets sail alone in the dark / at night. Sometimes under the awful glitter of stars. Some- / times into a thickly falling rain that sends the animals back to / their dens and causes the woods to drip and become the color / of owls. (p. 82)

Report from the West

Snow is falling west of here. The mountains have more than a / foot of it. I see the early morning sky dark as night. I won't lis- / ten to the weather report. I'll let the question of snow hang. / Answers only dull the senses. Even answers that are right often / make what they explain uninteresting. In nature the answers / are always changing. Rain to snow, for instance. Nature can / let the mysterious things alone - wet leaves plastered to tree / trunks, the intricate design of fish guts. The way we don't fall / off the earth at night when we look up at the North Star. The / way we know this may not always be so. The way our dizziness / makes us grab the long grass, hanging by our fingertips on the / edge of infinity. (p. 104)

[Claxton · Rating 4 out of 5]

Really enjoyed this. Here are two of my favorites:


Plains Spadefoot Toad

Toads are smarter than frogs. Like all of us who are not good-
looking they have to rely on their wits. A woman around the
beginning of the last century who was in love with frogs wrote a
wonderful book on frogs and toads. In it she says if you place a
frog and a toad on a table they will both hop. The toad will stop
just at the table’s edge, but the frog with its smooth skin and
pretty eyes will leap with all its beauty out into nothingness. I
tried it out on my kitchen table and it is true. That may explain
why toads live twice as long as frogs. Frogs are better at romance
though. A pair of spring peepers were once observed whispering
sweet nothings for thirty-four hours. Not by me. The toad and I
have not moved.



What the Plants Say

Tree, give up your secret. How can you be so satisfied? Why
don’t you need to change location, look for a better job, find
prettier scenery, or even want to get away from people?
Grass, you don’t care where you turn up. You appear running
loose in the oat field, out of a crack in a city street. You are the
first word in the vocabulary of the earth. How is it that you are
able to grow so near the lake without falling in? How can you be
so alert for the early frost, bend in the slightest breeze, and yet be
so hard to break that you are still there, quiet, green, among the
ruins of others?
Weed, it is you with your bad reputation that I love the most.
Teach me not to care what anyone has to say about me. Help me
to be in the world for no purpose at all except for the joy of sun-
light and rain. Keep me close to the edge, where everything wild
begins.

[Reid · Rating 3 out of 5]

I feel I must hasten to begin this review by confessing this: though I read a great deal of poetry, I do not purport to have enough knowledge of this art to be qualified to judge it. Granted, a case could be made that I am unqualified to judge any written work, but at least with prose I feel on solid ground as I make my case. With poetry, the ground shifts incessantly for me.

Having set out my lack of bona fides in this realm, then, let me share with you more a "common reader's" reaction to Darkness Sticks to Everything: I liked this book, but found many of the themes repetitive and, in the end, not interesting enough to be repeated so many times. There is only so long I can remain interested in poems about geese and trees, about dogs and crops, about autumn and leaves. Though Hennen can quite often turn an affecting phrase, more often than not, his poems peter out with a weak last line that undermines what came before.

I can't speak to the technical aspects of Mr. Hennen's poems, though I assume he has a certain facility in that regard, since so many prominent poets seem to admire him. Perhaps some day I will study this more thoroughly so I can feel a bit more comfortable commenting. For now, though, I am merely glad that, for a while yet at least, no more fall leaves will crunch under any more boots while geese glide by. Enough already, enough.

[Ariana · Rating 5 out of 5]

I am particularly moved by the intimacy Tom Hennen experiences with the world he lives amidst. May we all know such kinship with the nonhuman others: plant, animal, elemental... May we all allow ourselves to be so permeated.

Perhaps it's this porousness, this openness, that lends a sadness to his work as well. His words reveal a deep love, but are underscored with tenderness, vulnerability, even grief. Kudos to him for embracing it all with such wonder and devotion.

[sprouty · Rating 3 out of 5]

3 stars; a poetry collection related to nature, and all its whimsies and beauty, intrigued me, but I didn't connect with 98% of them, sadly. Faves were "Did I Say This Before?" and "Love for Other Things".

[Janet · Rating 5 out of 5]

Reread this favorite to start the new year.

[Trapper Markelz · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fantastic

I only discovered this because Jim Harrison did the intro. I’m a new fan. I’ll read everything Ted has written.

[b · Rating 5 out of 5]

Re-read. One of my favorite books.

[Jessica O · Rating 5 out of 5]

Tom Hennen's poetry gets inside your gut and takes up residence there. Stunning stuff. Highly recommended.

[Donna · Rating 4 out of 5]

Honestly, I picked this book up because I liked the title. It turned out to be a beautiful gem.

[Laura (booksnob) · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beautiful nature poems by an amazing poet from Minnesota!

[Katheryn Hill · Rating 5 out of 5]

Tom Hennen doesn’t miss much. Rich poetry about our natural world through all the seasons and his prose is my favorite.

[Richard Subber · Rating 3 out of 5]

“…Weed, it is you with your bad reputation that I love the most…Keep me close to the edge, where everything wild begins.” (from "What the Plants Say")

Hennen is tantalizing. He almost makes me want to read many of his poems a second time. But not quite. He has a persistent talent for jumping into the leaf pile and finding eccentric ways to look at and understand the things around us, and to see more of the world we share with the creatures and the stones and the dirt and the air. Yet, he buries his talent in too many words that cluster in the bottom of the bucket and never really spill over the side to make a poem full of a song or a dream or a wistful lingering sniff of the flowers she flaunted in her hair…
I read his poems, and I forget so much of them, so soon.
Hennen is tantalizing. He almost makes me want to read many of his poems a second time. But not quite. He has a persistent talent for riffing on eccentric ways to look at and understand the things around us, and the world we share with the creatures and the stones and the dirt and the air. Yet, he buries his talent in too many words that cluster in the bottom of the bucket and never really spill over the side to make a poem full of a song or a dream or a wistful lingering sniff of the flowers she flaunted in her hair.
I read his poems, and I forget so much of them, so soon.
Read more of my book reviews at:
http://richardsubber.com/

[Ann Michael · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a lovely collection of Hennen's quietly surprising work. His prose poems are vivid proof that "prose poem" is, indeed, a poetic form.

[Ann · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not being knowledgeable of poetry, this is the kind I enjoy, especially his prose poems. Sparse, but not simple. Hennen is the kind of writer who goes straight to the essence -- smell, color, movement. . . that drops you in the place he is sitting. I recognize a lot of the moments he paints from my growing up on a dairy farm and experiencing western Minnesota as an adult. To share one example: Summer Night Air: Night doesn't fall/ It rises / Out of low spots / Tree trunks / And the back / Of the old cow / I'm bringing home to milk.

[Pete · Rating 3 out of 5]

Perhaps it is because I am encountering Hennen for the first time in his collected poems, but the voice, style and subject became tedious for me. Hennen is, after the Robert Bly school, devoted to the image, yet I began wondering how many different ways there were for one writer committed to a specific voice to describe in plain and direct terms a tree, a shadow, a bug, a change of season and still be interesting. The length of the poems, often no more than six lines of just a few words each, echo that concentrated style. Only later in his work, judging at least by this collection, did it feel to me like the connection of the image of the thing to larger meaning sang. Until then, too many of these poems read like descriptions, rather than poems, and when they do reach seem sentimental. But there is also no questioning the evidence here of his devotion to clarity and his capacity to describe the nuances and passages of fleeting encounters with the natural world. I particularly liked "In Falling Snow at a Farm Auction," "Before a Rain in Spring," "From a Country Overlooked," "Sheep in the Rain," and "Plains Spadefoot Toad." The first of these will give you a sense of his tender and vivid attentions,

"In Falling Snow at a Farm Auction

Straight pine chair
Comfortable
In anyone's company
Older than Grandmother
It enters the present
With arms wide open
Wanting to hold another wife."

[AvianBuddha · Rating 5 out of 5]

Recently, I read Darkness Sticks to Everything: Collected and New Poems by Tom Hennen. His poetry is influenced heavily by Robert Bly's deep image movement (i.e., concreteness is valued over abstractness to allow images to convey the experience). Like Chinese poets such as Hanshan, his early poems possess laconic and reserved diction while providing uninhabited spaces for contemplation. In his later prose poems, he captures the rich detail of the Midwest landscape with its changing seasons, smells, and weather. Rather than focusing on the sameness of objects, his poetry expresses awe at their vast differences, while acknowledging their bitter-sweet evanescence. A collection like this one will appeal to those who enjoy poetry that celebrates "solitude, the earth, elemental presences, and the inner life". The following poem stuck with me:

Out of Nothing

Snow began slowly. Only one flake fell all morning. It was talked about by everyone as they gathered for coffee. It brought back memories of other times. Dreams of ice skates, long shotguns waving at geese, cities lighting up somewhere off the horizon in the cold gray day. Only one snowflake, but it fell with the grace of a star out of the ragged air. It filled the day with a clarity seldom noticed. It stood out sharply as a telephone pole against the skyline of the winter we each keep to ourselves.