Customer Reviews

The Mending Worm

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Winner of the New Issues Green Rose Prize, Joan Houlihan's second book offers many pleasures as it evokes its manifold emotional truths, including those connected with mother love, the later states of a love affair, and growing old. Through chiseled language, syntactic twists and word auras, sounds, and her use of the line break--its significance felt in the context of the whole complex physiology of each poem--Houlihan convinces us to believe in each poem's narrator and situation.

Through motherlove of her child, Houlihan's narrator transforms her own personal darkness ("Now come here so I can see / in your eyes the sky within.") yet has offered her child his own flight ("...child at the start of man, / your silhouette tensed in windshield light / and the new way you speak..."). Despair in erotic love is tinged more with sadness than hostility ("There is only one way to speak of this: / as a joy no longer curable"), recognition of a larger love now it is well past first heat ("She is bent to a matter made new, has gone / Intimate, abundant in it."). Rather than resigning herself to growing old, her narrator welcomes new eras. ("Why does the maker keep me awake? / He must want my oddments, their glow.")

Houlihan is required reading for everyone who loves life, poetry, the arts. Like "fears...privately boxed," her poems repel and attract. They stir those lights and darks so deeply ingrained in memory and in imagination.

Allegra Wong

Written by award-winning poet Joan Houlihan, The Mending Worm is a free-verse poetry collection of brief verses that nonetheless resonate with the very impression of the moment. Each short poem exquisitely captures the essence of experiencing its subject, from rationing in 1945 to the clumsy motions of a somnambulist to the incurable condition that is ardor. A passionate, varied, an delightfully consumable collection. "Preparing Migration": Perfected in high chambers, massed / among leaves, they are many-bodied / and ready to obey / as air changes to its one right pitch. // Inched into moth-hammered sleeves, / autumn feeds its hundred / as they mince along the branch / unstable in their need to lift, then // all wing and hinge, they raise. / This is the way I want you - / as long-awaited, as sudden.