Book Description

Poetry. If a fallacy is a mistaken belief; why choose to be mistaken; as the title of Edison Jennings' new poetry collection seems to invite? One answer comes in the opening poem; describing the North Star as "not too bright" and yet "glinting like a battered nail / from which the weight of heaven swings; / and nothing holds the nail in place / except the void it's stuck in. / For heaven's sake; old nail; hold tight." Just so; we hold tight to those things that give us comfort; even when there is nothing holding us back. Not that everything here is comforting. Jennings describes the life of working-class Appalachia with unsentimental; clear-eyed respect. "The coal dust settles everywhere" in "Tipple Town;" where "Daddy drinks and doesn't care / that mining made his lungs real weak... //...You don't see children anymore / in this exhausted mountain town." And when children are seen; "They're coal town girls with coal town traits; / their hopes long since tapped-out and sold." And this is nothing new: in "Brown-Eyed Girl" Jennings writes of the kinship; deep in DNA; between his "short-lived daughter" (to whom the book is dedicated) and the scant fossil remains of a Denisovan girl whose life was similarly brief. This is what it is to be human. Animals come off better; and he envies his old dog with her buried bone; even if wincing at "her stiff-hipped hobble-and-squat." The "Cats of Rome" are unimpressed by human affairs: "At the axis of the empire; they curl / round Trajan's column; indifferent / to a fault; at home in a falling world." Even his old blind rabbit; aware of coming death; "sleeps long and dreams about it / for it is the truth and he knows its secret." And then there islove; the hope and memory of it. Sleeping on an absent lover's side of the bed; to "smell the sheets where the weave is richest / with your scent." One "wants corruption; / the tumble and toss; the press of flesh; the blush and rush and mess love makes. Most redemptively; there is family. In "James at 7 & 17" he writes of every parent's fear for their children's safety; and yet of the knowledge that there comes the time for letting go: "I watch him dive and disappear / into a wreath of water // until he's birthed again out deep / and far beyond my reach." In another poem he recalls the moment of waking to see "my wife and child; composed into one shape; / gigantic night rebounding through the room / while they lie still; curled on the cusp of sleep; / mouth to breast and filling God with God." Is it a fallacy to hold onto such a belief? Perhaps so--but that is what makes us human; and makes life possible; even in the face of the void.