Reviewed by Sheila Black
The first poem in Raye Hendrix’s debut collection, What Good is Heaven, has an epigraph, “after Brigit Pageen Kelly.” This choice feels entirely appropriate to the concerns of the collection that follows. Carl Phillips writes of Brigit Pageen Kelly’s work that one primary task she sets herself is to “investigate why the world is so protean, pitching our human desire to empirically know a thing against a very real—and in the world of Kelly’s poems—an otherworldly resistance to so-called rational thinking.” This duality between real and otherworldly is viscerally present in Raye Hendrix’s poems, which have a high keening music that tends to circle around the often-shocking ways in which beauty and horror are inextricably intertwined in our so-called “natural world”:
we go to check them find
their bodies icebound to the rock
wings fallen hanging stiff
above their heads like lifted
hands in praise
(“The Bats”)
Hendrix’s book is almost a case study on how to bring knowledge of place into writing—or, still further, how language grows and finds itself through land knowing. The language of these poems possesses a rare granularity, a muscled lyricism, that feels to have been forged (or forced) out of the Southern landscapes —the Mississippi and Alabama coastlines where Hendricks was raised. Yet in Hendrix’s work this meticulous engagement of words and land becomes transmuted into an ongoing mapping of how place also forms and shapes human character in ways worthy of our love and also of our despair.
This layering of land and people springboards the collection into an ongoing mediation that (as signaled by the collection’s title) is concerned by the question of how best to live in the world, how to balance the now with the eternal or otherworldly or, maybe more precisely, how this happens almost in spite of us. Alongside this larger question, Hendrix engages issues of identity and disability in charged and heartfelt ways, defending and/or tracing what Carl Phillips in discussing Birgit Pageen Kelly keeps referring to as the protean or metamorphic nature of our reality and how this is a source of both wonder and terror, joy and loss.
In one especially strong poem, Hendricks writes of learning the apparently ageless lake of her children was actually dug by the men of the town:
When my grandfather tells me
the lake I grew up on isn’t
natural, that it was dug out
of the mountainside by the sons
and grandsons of old men
who wanted a place to retire,
a place to die, I wonder if my own
father would have been
one of them—if I could have
done it: dig a lesser Heaven
for the not-yet-dead.
(“Fishing on Sundays”)
At the end of the poem, Hendrix asks, “why/don’t we sing hymns to them/instead of God,” marking how through their closeness to it her people have half become of the land and as such almost God-like to the speaker as a child. Yet over the course of the book, she also traces how this closeness to land births fear, the atavistic terror of being part of such a powerful and protean landscape, or engine, creating a context for rigidity, intolerance, and Old Testament cruelty, in which the speaker with her non-normative self, her queerness, her greening desire becomes a target.
He tells me about conversion and says
I need to let him in ( )
because his method is most successful
when his clients comply though acquiescence
isn’t required. Let not a woman speak he says
Let a woman learn with silence and submission
and when I say No he locks the door.
(“Let Not a Woman”)
One of the many moving elements of this collection is the tenderness and fidelity with which Hendrix unpacks both sides of this irreconcilable equation—the people and places she loves even as they demonstrate an intolerance and opposition to her and what she is in her truest self. In the poem “Urushiol” she writes of her father:
These are his traits I am not heir to:
black hair
olive skin
arms capable of cradling a child
and, we learned that day,
the poison of those weeds,
urushiol the only fault
I managed to escape.
(My father held me anyway.)
That night he bathed himself
in calamine, and with its pink
sheen of softness his body
almost looked like mine.
Out of a simple story of a childhood encounter with poison ivy, Hendrix deftly maps the push and pull of kinship against difference, the hearkening forward and back we all must do in our attempts to reconcile our heritage, our history with who we would want most to be. In the most powerful poems here, metaphor becomes a way of both collapsing and transcending such differences while celebrating, always, the glory of being and desire.
One of the pleasures of the book is that her almost documentary description of a nature that is multiple and manifold translates later into poems of queer desire that are some of the most gorgeous and compelling love poems I’ve read recently—as in these lines from “Hunger”:
I succumb anyway
break plum from branchand delight at the weight
in my palm the breastheavy curve then the pop
sound of teeth breakinghuman-soft skin
forbidden plum blood
The arc of this collection can be seen as one of how wonder grows into the bravery of love while never diminishing one iota the difficulty of loving what is difficult. Hendrix does not idealize or sentimentalize; instead, she documents and creates intense love through intense observation.
In one of the later poems in the book, “Hurt in the Sole of Every Joy,” Hendrix makes an argument for the illogical logic of this, the—in Phillips’ words —“otherworldly resistance to rational thinking,” that is for him part of the mysterious power of a great lyric poet like Brigit Pageen Kelly. The poem describes how as a girl, Hendrix’s mother stepped on a glass she had dropped and broken on the kitchen floor. The sliver goes deep, so deep the mother can never get it out.
she almost forgot the glass
was even there, the reminder
most often coming on the heels
of delight: a thoughtless turn
while barefoot dancing,
When the doctor finally spots the infinitesimal sliver on an x-ray, he tells Hendrix’s mother there is no point in taking it out: “the glass/is part of her body”:
more pain would come
from its removal
than if she let it be, so
she let it be
It would be a mistake, in the universe of Hendrix’s poems to read that “let it be” as one of resignation—it is rather one of awareness; a truth that opens the reader to more questions: how to imagine love when love is not simple; how to imagine a cosmology that grieves the fox and the chickens, that acknowledges the reality of violence, yet does not forget the protean, the plentiful —one might even say the infinitude —of earthly beauty. In this time of war, cruel sectarianism, and rising oppression, this notion of a complicated but fiercely tended love feels like the closest we might get to answering the question of how we are to live now.
In “Blue Ridge Lookout” Hendrix writes:
This is how it goes: we burn
the mountains and die
in a world without mountains.
We don’t have any clue
how to make a bird.
This is a remarkable first collection. I look forward to reading more from Hendrix, to re-entering her plangent, grounded, yet indelible lyric vision.
Title: What Good is Heaven
Author: Raye Hendrix
Publisher: Texas A&M University Press
Year: 2024
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About the Reviewer
Sheila Black is the author of five poetry collections, most recently Radium Dream from Salmon Poetry, Ireland. Poems and essays have appeared in Poetry, Ploughshares, The Nation, The New York Times, and elsewhere. She is a co-editor of Beauty is a Verb: The New Poetry of Disability. Honors include a 2012 Witter Bynner Fellowship from the Library of Congress for which she was selected by Philip Levine. She lives in San Antonio, TX and Tempe, AZ where she is assistant director of the Virginia G. Piper Center for Creative Writing at Arizona State University (ASU).