Inconsequentia

by Derek Henderson, Derek Pollard

The horizon of these poems is a lifeline, truly. Here I find rescue everywhere and every way I turn. Henderson and Pollard have fronted catastrophe with loving eyes. Small wonder, then, that they find miracles.


Donald Revell


In this sequence, the collaboration between word and reader, writer and responder, life and death, Derek and Derek, is an invitation, a dance card in which the dancer and the danced become not a duet but a crowd of possibility—“the shining market of us."

Eleni Sikelianos


Across a speeding surface, horizons and stutters, typewriters and streetlamps, phrases and fragments couple and uncouple, creating a train of language impossibly shaped as an expanding web of returns and responses, and the coupling goes on, gets faster and faster; little lights begin to blink; those are in your head, and it’s the text that’s doing it —that and the dead, who also come back again and again. The Dereks manage to capture all this while keeping it hurtling forward. Vertiginous—and very moving.

Cole Swensen

102 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 2010

Reviews

[C. Varn · Rating 5 out of 5]

Derek Henderson and Derek Pollard have written a book that is particularly hard to write about--a book that allows images to bubble up, fragments to be found and commented upon, and then fall back down into a seeming morass of poetry. The way banalities and self-obsession are allow to emerge and collapse in what is seeming stream of poetry truly works well. I highly encourage others to experience it.

[Derek H · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great book, if I do say so myself.