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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Poetry for the Occasional and the Obsessional Poetry Reader,
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This review is from: Bridge and Tunnel (Paperback)
In this first book, "Bridge and Tunnel" John Hennessy's rich language takes us through the industrial landscape of New Jersey with humor, heart, and a sharp eye. He introduces us to the neighborhood, the times, and to the local characters, "Mike Devlin"and "Dr. Swann".
Even when we meet bullies and abusers, Hennessy never strays into bathos or hysteria. For instance in, "How the Dog-Star Got His Name," he keeps an even tone,a matter-of-fact voice as the poem balances a mixture of pity, rage, confusion, and revenge. Here Hennessy uses every word to work out the complex truths he finds in the experience. The poems in "Bridge and Tunnel" are energetic, accessible, wise, interesting, and original. In this collection the poems build on and interact with each other in a way that cannot be captured except by reading the whole book.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
check out page 42!,
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This review is from: Bridge and Tunnel (Paperback)
I haven't had a chance to digest this entire amazing volume of delicious poetry yet, and am literally chewing it one word at a time. MY DATE WITH SATAN is what made me want to buy this book and what a juicy little vignette it is. Women will LOVE this. FREE UNION is another poem to savor, again one that will appeal deeply to women.
This is a down to earth, EARTHY voice about life on earth - not about the etheral or spiritual in the least.
5.0 out of 5 stars
from Harvard Review,
By
This review is from: Bridge and Tunnel (Paperback)
Bridge and Tunnel
Harvard Review, June, 2008 by Jacquelyn Pope Bridge and Tunnel by John Hennessy, Turning Point, 2007, $17.00 paper, ISBN 9781933456553. New Jersey, one of the most exploited tropes in American popular culture, would seem to present an uneasy subject for a contemporary poet, even if it is his birthright. Williams's Paterson set one standard, which has since been noisily usurped, in the popular imagination, by Springsteen, wise guys, and toxic waste dumps. John Hennessy has taken on the loaded subject of his native state, and in doing so has staked out a vivid territory, inverting and exploiting cliches along the way. The bridges and tunnels in this, his first collection of poems, lead not only to and from; they also lead back through memory, time, and states of mind, and on through their insistence on a tactile connection to the physical world. Hennessy writes with a cinematographer's scope and sweep, with a novelist's gift for telling detail, but his poems never collapse from the weight of what they collect because his language is sinuous, agile and taut, both tough--minded and tender--hearted. The landscape of many of these poems is postindustrial and apparent ly deserted--perhaps the first image most people conjure when they hear the words "New Jersey" In Hennessy's rendering, however, there is a lush wildness and a dizzy intermingling of men and ghosts that underscores everything. Figures appear out of darkness, or from different periods of time, almost as if willing themselves into being. "Signing the Kills" opens the book with these lines: That might have been me, the boy you saw walking below the smokestacks. All night he crossed the bridges between boroughs, hitch-hiked rides beneath the rivers. Merck and Esso loom in this place, with a presence that is not unlike the steel plants in James Wright's Martin's Ferry. Like Wright, Hennessy has some bruised feelings about the place he left behind, and the same certainty that it has not left him. Unlike Wright, though, Hennessy has a clearly tender regard for that place and a delight in exploiting its linguistic gifts. Hennessy's language is muscular, push--and-shove, lively with rhyming and puns, and dense with contrasts. Fish, refineries, smoke, and silt are repeated emblems in this wild landscape of detritus and lost souls. There are magical turns, too: gardens thriving in winter rooms, beds that are rafts, conveyances between worlds, a waterlogged cell phone that calls up the past. Old friends, foes, even passersby are described with a story--teller's sure hand: there is Krishna Jane, punk in a buzz cut and a Spartacus Youth T--shirt who, like the speaker, aspires to the Lower East Side; Mike Devlin, who speaks through a "baritone kazoo of tracheotomy"; and Dog Star Freddy, local miscreant, who kills birds and lures the local kids to a fetid basement into which all sorts of evil seems to ooze: sun--burned dumpsters, rat sunk in hallway walls, drunken vets stumbled singing out of Pets's, incontinently sprinkled streets, Merck chemical plant's fuel tank leaked. At the heart of the book, the four--part sequence "In the Kills" intensifies the images and themes found throughout it, rendering them in a biblical framework with both religious and natural cosmologies layered on and around the sensual world. In "Settling Up" Hennessy writes: Brooks, rivers, creeks wash inland seas with silt and chem--plant seep. But I am a tide which fills the empty spaces. I spread beyond the kills; I come like water, restoring where you've built. Adolescence, that combustible blend of yearning, sexual fumbling, and violence, is another territory Hennessy deftly explores, describing a Bishopian kind of revelation of self--and--other that takes place in weeds, rather than in a waiting room, in "Love Along the Rahway River." Sex, as an intermingling of life and death, surfaces in many of the poems, where the god Pan emerges in Arkansas, where young love's object is a youngwoman whose shaved head is a badge of exquisite vulnerability, where married love and children are described with the same kind of adolescent wonder, but with real joy and connection taking the place of longing and frustration. In "Free Union," Hennessy praises his wife: Whose eyes are the sleep that comes with fever And the dreams of bearded iris My wife with the eyes that are a cloudburst A cliff--dive a border--crossing Tugboats cuffing around the inlet Sunlight in the sea from which I never surface A poet who cherishes his subjects so keenly and inventively risks being carried away by his own flights of fancy. Hennessy, though, is a real Jersey boy--quick-witted, self--deprecating, entirely earthbound--with gifts for attention and invention that make the world of Bridge and Tunnel a singular place to be. COPYRIGHT 2008 Harvard Review
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