Garden Effigies by Sara Henning
dancing girl press, 2015
Sara Henning’s new chapbook Garden Effigies is built on the premise that everything is transient, at risk at all times. What might normally be considered images of stability—trees, friends, family—are just as ephemeral as music or love. A father fells the trees, then himself. Friends share confidences before vanishing. Marilyn Monroe, the most fragile of stars, makes an appearance, having already been burned to darkness. Ash dissipates into a flock of birds.
In short, there is precious little security here. It’s not just that anything can be taken, it’s that it will be taken. The natural world is untrustworthy, full of scuttling and fleeing and water that threatens instead of soothes. A child fakes drowning to fool her friend, and her laughter is a stinging betrayal. Ships travel—possibly to safety, but always away, leaving the speaker, and us with her, marooned. Lovers are relegated to the past tense. Even the speaker warns us against having faith in her: “I’m an alibi / for salvage, not a bevy of stone.”
But make no mistake—these poems are solid and secure, taking us in surefooted steps from word to word, line to line, poem to poem. The lines are often miniature prose poems themselves, so long they take up three or five lines of text, split with stanza breaks, and lush—my word, are they ever lush. Take this, the last stanza of “Apple Blossom, Dementia, Dead Bird”:
Some things fall away in divine sequence, when left long enough to be
longing: apple blossoms, origami cranes, rain covering one’s body with
kisses so tender they’re anonymous.
It’s tempting to end here, let you decide to pick up Henning’s chapbook for yourself and dive in—the defense rests, your honor. It is difficult to do the collection justice, to be perfectly honest, because it relies on a slow accumulation of image and language and mood, a gathering that cannot be accurately conveyed within the limitations of a review. Reading it is like standing in the wash at low tide, losing yourself in the beauty of the sea, and only realizing time has passed when you notice that the water has somehow reached your knees. It’s like deciding you’ll stay a little longer and having waves at your chest before you know it. You can swim, you have your feet beneath you still, albeit on sand, but you are in very, very deep, and you don’t mind at all. Our understanding of the poems and the world of the poems is something like that: a lovely, enveloping flood.
Garden Effigies contains myriad floods: floods of violence, love, loss, waiting. “In my pain, I stopped being a girl,” the speaker of “At the Mercy of the Surge” claims, and at that point we are ready to come of age with her. In “During the Tornado, I’m Thinking of Stars,” she says, “You only kissed me like a tempest / plunges itself into the border of a larger / vortex before the surge begins.” This collection is tempest and plunge, border and vortex, and—most very certainly—surge.
Ruth Foley’s work appears in numerous web and print journals, including Adroit, Sou’wester, and Valparaiso Poetry Review. She is the author of the chapbooks Dear Turquoise and Creature Feature, and the full-length collection Dead Man’s Float (forthcoming from ELJ). She serves as managing editor for Cider Press Review.