Review: Christopher Hennessy’s “Love-In-Idleness”

I bought Christopher Hennessy’s Love-In-Idleness back in December, along with Haruki Murakami’s 1Q84 and Alan Hollinghurst’s The Stranger’s Child. So far, I’ve enjoyed about a third of the Murakami, have yet to start the Hollinghurst (to be fair, I’m waiting for the first real snowstorm of the season, as somehow it seems a better fit with a groaning white roof and a Irish coffee), and have read most of the poems in Hennessy’s debut often enough to have certain lines by heart.

Love-In-Idleness is a book of three parts. The first, The Cicada, and Other Lessons, interrogates the past with an urgency shorn of nostalgia. In “If Recriminations,” the poet revisits a boyhood “you” who remained “hidden / in plain sight on the playground,” observing “the boys / on the blacktop who doffed their shirts / at recess (hot brown backs in the sun).” The poem’s loaded questions escalate in scope and consequence, its references to Toto and Pretty in Pink, to discount soda and “the smell of diesel and sweat,” anchoring its rhetoric in a vivid physical landscape of rural boyhood, to reach a quietly devastating conclusion.

“Gross Anatomy of the Midwestern Body” investigates – with dignity and love, but also without shame – the illnesses and absences of the human body through one family: “Father’s once hooked-out eye,” a grandmother whose “spine / is rent into a question / by years of carrying two / heavy pails of cancer’s milk,” a great-grandfather who “left his arm – forgotten / in the haste for home — / somewhere in the far field, torn off and sown with the corn.” Something of Dorothea Lange’s sympathetic but unsparing eye glimmers in these spare and bleakly beautiful portraits.

The dominant weather is that of fall and winter, a slumbering, cocooning time, haunted by family and familiar neighbors whose own singular mysteries may be questioned, guessed at, but never quite resolved: the eerie Crick sisters of “Ghost Boy,” the father smoking in the snow of a Michigan winter in “Wreckage,” the “granite- / willed farm girls” of “Mud, Milk, Snow, Mud” and “’You Are the Pin-Holder’” and “After My Grandmother’s Funeral.”

The poems of Split Secrets, the second section, assemble an intriguing choir of voices: a fifteenth-century Incan girl sacrificed to the gods, Icarus, the lovers of St. Sebastian and the Emperor Ai (who famously cut off his sleeve to avoid waking his sleeping partner). Hennessy gives startling and artful voice to Romeo’s first (silent, invisible) love in “Rosaline,” and demands in the deadly playful “Satie’s Instructions for Your Love Life:” “Breathe through / the nose so you can / sing into every mouth, / light every orifice.”

Hennessy’s persona poems accomplish this mission terrifically well, even as he wrestles with some truly heavyweight subjects: see “Gethsemane” (which contains the echo of James Wright and the wonderful lines “I would die to live / as a carpenter’s son, to see / my rough hands make a thing / as real and inhuman as I am”) and “Jacob” (“I want you, would again wrestle you / to the ground and deny prophecy / if only to name your beauty”).

In the third section of the book, Almost a Bedroom, the camera pushes in to achieve an intimacy of scale that permits just enough room for two: the poet and “you.” Images of food (eggs figure prominently) and the mouth take center stage in these gorgeous love poems, rich with a fragility that never tips into preciousness.

Here are nights as “a mire of sticky rinds, / bouquets of stiff baguettes” and morning sun that “hums from the homemade vase.” In the beautiful “Still Life with Jars,” apple slices and simple clay jars filled with water are instruments of prophecy, and “Aubade with Plum” reclaims a morning after with language that soars (arms and legs that have “grown together in the night like the dune’s pillow weeds”) and swoops (“you scribbling a note – ‘Gone / to Mickey D’s for a coffee, some grub’”) to land with elegant precision: “I held what felt like a whole plum caught in my throat , / and watched the sky turn from shades of plum / to goddam shades of plum.”

Hennessy is fully capable of springing surprises, too, as in the wonderful “Waiting Room,” in which the glimpse of a woman’s exposed ankle in close proximity to the “anticipation / of the doctor’s press on my bare chest” prompts both an erection and a reflection: “I know there are dips in the human skin, / hollowed out like open mouths, places / meant to be found in the dark, fumbling / to fill or to excavate.”

There’s a persuasive affinity at work in “Waiting Room,” as there is in perhaps the finest poem of this section, “Blood in the Cum,” in which a love poem is figured as a “way to sew / our two mouths shut / with a kiss so thin it’s invisible.” Not a word feels out of place here: confident, concise, the poem moves with a grace and restraint that feel inevitable. It is, to a reader, a remarkable achievement, and to a poet, a goad and an inspiration and a gift all at once, and it leaves me eager to envy more and more of Christopher Hennessy’s work.