Customer Reviews

Tender Hooks: Poems

5 star:		(12)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(5)

 

 

I avidly read poetry once, and for a long time, but I eventually grew tired of what I saw was a trend toward precious lessons on lexicon rather than on life. Beth Ann Fennelly is different. There is geniune experience underlying the pages of TENDER HOOKS, and experience-bred passion, and wit, and bravery, and evident love. The best of Fennelly is on par with the best of Wilbur and Larkin and Bishop and Frost, and I'm thinking especially of her baby poems, especially the first two. They leave me breathless on every read.

I don't read that much poetry, but this book took my breath away. I bought it because Lucinda Williams has a quote on the back, and now I'm an even bigger fan of hers. Ms. Fennelly writes poems that are both clear and strange, poems I "got," poems I'll read over and over and over and over. I'll say this, too: Her daughter and husband are fortunate. Buy this book for your mother for Mother's Day, and for your father for Father's Day. I hope one of those book clubs picks it up, because it's mostly women who read those recommended books, and this is a book women will love. Of course, men will too--I'm proof of that.

Ms. Fennelly's work represents everything I want from poetry. It touches my mind with immediate recognition and my soul with its' genius and my heart with aches of pleasure and pain in the mutually shared experiences of life.

Her images are succinct, apt, and, frequently, very funny. And, on top of it all, I can understand everything she's talking about.

I read poetry and teach poetry writing, and I've seen Fennelly's poems around a bit. Tender Hooks was recommended to me by a student, and then I saw a review of it in The Atlanta Journal Constitution that interested me, so I bought it and I'm so glad I did. My favorite poem is "Telling the Gospel Truth" which I'd seen in The Kenyon Review last year. I found it very moving and accomplished with its references to Dickinson and Donne and others--formally exciting and emotionally brave. I love the range of work, from a sonnet and a few extremely short poems to several poems that are 5-10 pages long. The book itself is also physically gorgeous. Really, the whole experience of reading it--and rereading it-- was brilliant.

Please ignore all the reviews beginning with Jerry Ward's, and read this book for what it is: a treasure. Ms. Fennelly doesn't write only about her body but about the complicated idea of motherhood, the heartbreak of miscarriage, the teaching and writing of poetry, and many, many more things. I did some looking and discovered that her editor at Norton is the editor of Andrea Barrett, Pam Houston, Ron Carlson, and many other fine writers. That Ms. Fennelly, at quite a young age, is publishing with a New York house, one of the very best, possibly has other poets a little jealous. But please, all of you, stop using this poet and her book as a reason to exchange potshots. And I dare any readers out there to find a better book.

Fennelly is one of the best poets of our age. She writes everything from heroic couplets to free verse with grace and eloquence. She demonstrates rare intelligence, wit, and sensitivity. Her poems originate in the specific geography of a woman's life, but they do not wallow in self-absorbed introspection. Rather, they investigate the relation between self and world, the individual and her many communities. I've given Fennelly's poems to many people from many disparate walks of life (men and women, everyone from students to wildlife educators to mortgage brokers to my 75 year old grandmother), and every single person I've given her books to has become a fan. Her poetry is accesible to new readers, but her intelligence, mastery of form, and ongoing conversation with the works of poets before her continue to challenge even advanced scholars of poetry. Her work is accomplished and powerful.

Poet Fennelly's approach to motherhood is exquisitely intimate, yet accessible as she explores the deep emotions that burst free when a woman gives birth, defining the indefinable, expressing thoughts that most are afraid to acknowledge, let alone put into words.

Truly, motherhood unearths a vast reservoir of visceral feelings, both familiar and unfamiliar; yet Fennelly writes in such a way as to expose that sensitive emotional underbelly suddenly made vulnerable. In language both simple and profound, these poems celebrate the joy of a child's complete dependency, the sensation of newborn skin and sharp pain at the merest thought of loss. This poet mines language until it serves up the desired effect, plunging into private thoughts and fears with a passionate intensity:

"The great dramas all begin like this:
a surfeit of happiness, a glass-smooth pond
just begging for a stone."

Harrowing, erotic and blissful, Fennelly pushes beyond the sentimental into the bittersweet experience of new motherhood. The poet explores both joy and loss, birth and death, as she celebrates her daughter, Claire, yet grieves the loss of one she lost, another girl, probing those feelings like a tongue testing a tender tooth, aware that life's realities are not to be denied. Tender Hooks (a childish misnomer of "tenterhooks") fills me with images and awakened feelings, a quiet excitement at having found this wonderful poet. I cannot imagine that I might have missed this stunning collection. Luan Gaines/2004.

This is one of the smartest, most accomplished books I've read in a long time. Formally interesting and emotionally mature, the poems have stuck with me every since I read them the first time a few weeks back, and reread them this week--wonderfully compelling in their musicality and range.

Tender Hooks (as well as Fennelly's Open House) are amazing poems. Tender Hooks brings to print many things that mothers have experienced. The feelings and emotions that Fennelly wries about might only be truly understood by mothers, but can be appreciated by all (except Mr. Ward). An absolutely wonderful book! It is also a great gift to give expecting mothers!

Oh my goodness! I felt the need to reply to one reviewer in particular, Mr. Ward.

Of course I agree, as does any sane person, that the world is about to be overtaken by poetry and that something must be done about it... there is simply too much poetry everywhere! Everywhere I go, every person on the bus is clutching a volume of poetry ground out by the evil forces of that sinister organization the poetry mill.

And of course I concur that if anyone should have the final say about women's literary explorations of their own bodies, it should be Mr. Ward. I do not know Mr. Ward, of course, but I am quite sure that where women's bodies are concerned he is the man to see!

Lastly, he is quite correct that poetry should fulfill a strict set of socially uplifting guidelines, and address these weighty topics with the bone-dry correctness of a tenth grade algebra paper. If all this says poetry to you, as it does to me and Mr. Ward, please stay away from Fennelly's troubling book which, it turns out, is nothing like a tenth grade algebra paper, is not as uplifting as NBC's "The More You Know" campaign, and threatens to drown us all in a flood of brilliant and bloody imagery - the likes of which we have come, so wisely, to take for granted in our poetry-obsessed nation.

And most importantly of all, Fennelly does us the great disservice of talking about her own body and her own child in a completely new, raw and startling way that bears little resemblence to that wonderful old comic strip "The Family Circus," which is, I suspect, the mighty standard to which Mr. Ward rightfully compares Fennelly's unfortunate soul. But I ask you: Who could measure up to that? Perhaps only Jerry Ward himself, if his masterful review is any indication!

I might only request, as a parting wish, that Mr. Ward consider binding some of his reviews in volume form. This, ironically, may bring about the new dawn of literature for which he pines.