Darkness Sticks to Everything: Collected and New Poems

Excellent poetry, almost haiku like, definitely with a zen overtone.

This is the kind of book you pick up now and again and read and connect with the feelings these writings provoke. It's like seeing an old friend. I bought one as a gift and the recipient was delighted.

Darkness Sticks to Everything has sparked once again my interest in poetry, which I am sad to confess has flagged through the decades since as an undergraduate I scoffed at the notion that poetry's appeal primarily is to the young.Even more surprising for me is that Tom Hennen's tactile imagery hearken the works of poets I disdained in my youth, particularly Gerard Manley Hopkins and William Carlos Williams. I also detect a little something of Robert Frost there as well. And, I see the ghost of Robert Penn Warren in the melancholy underlying personal relationships.Each of the poems strikes a chord in me, such as this from Clouds Rise Like Fish:The island in the lake drifts even farther from shore.Heat increases.The afternoon begins its insect hum.We can tell a storm is comingBy looking into each other's eyes.Sheep in the Winter Night brings Penn Warren's A Way to Love God to my mind. Both have sheep as their subject.Penn Warren's poem is considerably more expansive and in contrast to Hennen's now seems less focused. Hennen's concludes:The owl and rabbit were wondering, along with the trees, if the air would soon fill with snowflakes, but the power that moves through the world and makes our hair stand on end was keeping the answer to itself.As the title suggests, darkness insinuates itself in these 157 poems, not unlike the darkness Frost saw in the forest in his meditation while Stopping by the Woods on a Snowy Evening. Again though, Hennen's poetry is considerably more economical and streamlined than Frost's.

This was the first time I read the poetry of Tom Hennen. He impresses me with the simplicity of his style and the vividness and vitality of his imagery. Even inanimate things are given choices to make in some of these poems. He makes us aware of the world in a specific way, related to the northern prairie, but containing elements anyone can recognize who has spent any time observing nature. The poet himself, and indeed any humans, seem peripheral to the natural world he writes about, and have only cameo appearances in many of these works. There is a depth of solitude about these poems for me, but not of loneliness. There is a pervading impression of calmness, thoughtfulness and understated wonder in Tom Hennen's poetry. It will not get your blood boiling, or make you blush; I think it will make you see things around you with heightened awareness and appreciation. This poetry can be a welcome antidote for the turmoil and anxiety of the daily headlines.

"The poetry of earth is never dead," said Keats, and he's certainly right, although it's a subject so often visited that it must be deucedly difficult to find fresh ways of poetically exploring it as opposed to, say, leukemia or fat children or Native American smoke signals. In the introduction to this marvelous collection, Jim Harrison comments that he knows of no other poet in the United States better informed on the simple rural life, and that's not hyperbole. These poems are breathtaking. I tend not to like short lines, but the short-lined early poems often sledge-hammered me at some point along the way, and the prose poems of later in the career are endlessly staggering, to wit, this final verse from the poem titled, "What the Plants Say:""Weed, it is you with your bad reputation that I love the most. Teach me not to care what anyone has to say about me. Help me to be in the world for no purpose at all except for the joy of sunlight and rain. Keep me close to the edge, where everything wild begins."Hennen's work is a marvel.

This is a wonderful book of poetry that will sit on my bedside table throughout the spring.

Many of the poems are excellent; many of the prose poems are not, as they read as paragraphs out of unfinished short stories or novels. I found myself wishing that the author had tried to write these pro-ems as poems, rather than as unfinished ideas for more concise and meaningful poems.

I enjoyed this book of poems very much. Tom Hennen has a simple and elegant why of capturing everyday life.