Terra Incognita: Poems by Sara Henning
Ohio University Press, 2022
I first came to know poet Sara Henning’s writing through her first book, View From True North, winner of The Crab Orchard Series in Poetry Open Competition Award and The Cider Press Review Book Award. It just so happened that I attended Southern Illinois University Carbondale for my MFA very soon after Henning won this award and thus View From True North was born in that crowded little room I would come to know as Crab Orchard Review. Having never lived outside my home state, I had no idea what to expect as I began to take off my shoes and socks and dip into the whorl and shifting grit of an MFA program and by extension, the creative writing world. I remember the wake of Henning’s award still echoed through the halls as I went through orientation and began my career as a writer. It was a welcoming sound, and that collection soon became as valuable a teacher as my professors in the program. In that book, Henning’s tool is unabashed confession which shines remarkably in the poem, “For My Sister, Miscarried.”
I watch my mother / bind what’s left / of my sister in the skirt / haloing her ankles, burn / her like musk / thistle culled from my father’s / grave. I wait for the hole, / the blaze. For hours, / we choke on cinder, / salt, envy the only / cauldron-bound spirit / among us to quit her / mother’s body, fly.
The subtle imagery of death is unobtrusive yet revealing. To stack meaning upon meaning like in the lines “haloing her ankles,” and “I wait for the hole,” is a signature imaginative move for Henning. Her direct honesty coupled with colorful, yet clever word play is what makes the ending of this poem, like many others in both poetry collections, so powerful.
In Terra Incognita, winner of the 2021 Hollis Summers Poetry Prize, Henning unravels that unknown land we call grief. A land wherein she defines for the reader the intimacy of loss; a mother, a creator, a true person of necessity studded with ulcer malignant:
Grief is an island of mercy touching my skin.
It hurts like hell to bury your mother.Longing is my other story—not cancer,
not coma hushing her into its dirty hymn.
I sink my heels into darkness, that silky tether.
The book exhibits the wisdom of pain as a “story of mercy,” and we sit in Henning’s story like a sanctum, like a child in bed patiently awaiting a mother’s kiss. Merciful is a place of peace in this book; where a woman’s body dies and where the author goes to remember. Motherhood becomes a central theme in this collection, not for what it is by definition or opinion, but for what it can be even after we lose a mother. Henning breathes life back into the speaker’s mother, and she exists in the poems to teach the reader love, grief, and the bonds of family beyond that which society expects. It’s as if Henning is here to teach us through her poems a new way to grieve and love; a way not unlike the heaping sigh one gives when they hug a loved one after some devastating event.
The book is structured into four parts: Terra Inferno, Terra Incognita, Tera Nova and Terra Firma. From the first poem, we hear Henning’s voice embody ultimate kindness. She regards her readers the way we are taught from a young age to regard the stranger; acceptance pure and gentle:
And sometimes, a pull off of an unfiltered cigarette
and you’re here like hard jade, another dark night of the soul.
Sometimes, I dream of your steel-blue eyes, wake up
with them instead of my own. Which is to say, God
is the geometry guiding our mercy. I want to say love
is the cigarette smoke haunting a heaven without you
Terra Incognita dapples in a language we all understand as readers: death by illness. Henning is a master of holding that familiar feeling─that language─in her reader through her experience of loss, which is evident especially in poems like “Elegy For The Color Pink”:
Once, I heard color referred to as a loss of innocence, as if color could awaken us. For Homer, even / the sea was wine-dark, the darkest pulse of pink possible. I’m trying to say something about my / mother’s face when bilirubin thickened her blood, her liver duct stent collapsed by tumors. Homer / must have settled on wine-dark to describe the sea because no reference to blue existed in the / Odyssey, and his whole system of color was a kaleidoscope of errors: violet sheep ghosting the / fields. Green honey. If my mother were a color, I’d call her winterkilled lemon on the verge of / horizon. It is true—there was no record of blue until the ancient Egyptian texts, but pink has always / existed in the pulse of the brine.
I hold Sara’s image of a mother in my hand knowing the sting of cancer looms; “that honey-crust stink of a wound already damned.” We put our trust in Sara to guide us through what it means to be a “Daughter, a gardenia milking the sun-parched earth,” and we are comforted by a love unfolding into a galaxy’s never. What I mean is a love that turns us, our bodies, into the natural order of fruit, a “yellow-green love like the moon in heat.” Sara’s images are profound and binding in her concepts of the self as a mosaic of all that we can lose and all that we can love. For us, through joy, Henning sings a mother’s elegy; and we collectively let her go.
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Lauren Crawford holds an MFA from SIUC. Her debut collection, Catch & Release, is forthcoming in March 2025 with Cornerstone Press. She received the 2023 Willie Morris Award, and her poetry is published/forthcoming in Poet Lore, Best New Poets, PNM, Ponder Review, The Midwest Quarterly, SoFloPoJo and elsewhere. Connect with her @laurencraw.bsky.social.