Tender Hooks: Poems

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.

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.

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.