Poetry. Donna Henderson's new collection traces the contours of the "eddy fence" where love and loss meet. In poems that confront a mother's illness, a forest's destruction, and the struggles to seed new life, she discovers a difficult beauty and passage to healing. Here we encounter a restless intelligence in dialogue with itself, seeking to enter the world more entirely through deeper and deeper seeing.
"Though the forest be gone, still 'the woods were in the song.' So Henderson describes the thrush, singing on, like her, the once 'green and cool surround' nothing now but a naked clear-cut hill, whose logging and loss is paralleled by her mother's dying. In the transit of these light- filled, sensuous poems, an acute consciousness turns mourning to praise in large-hearted lines—'spacious…enough to hold all the trees / and their absence, and every other thing.'"—Eleanor Wilner
"…strong and moving, remarkably poised in tone and unified as the expression of a distinct voice. Every poem in it needs to be there, the reader believes, listening to a consciousness meditating on loss in relationships with the human and non-human, and negotiating ways to affirm life, nevertheless."—Joan Aleshire
"…remarkable…Its music is quiet, its intelligence is omni- present. The book has tremendous range in topic—nature, relationship, loss, spirituality."—Karen Brennan