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In poems of mature range and facility, Cathryn Hankla addresses with humor and wonder the many tensions we must battle in forging both relationships and the self amidst the weight of our collective history. She discovers likeness in seemingly disparate subjects — animal and human, seen and unseen, speech and silence, the pardoned and the condemned — applying the reason of the heart and spirit in a reconciliation of the many dissonances life presents.
Always nimble, intelligent, and truthful, these poems speak to what is most elusive and yet most valuable in being human. Filled with droll wit, the familiar in unexpected places, and the strange in the mundane, they present the world as both a spiritual storehouse and a schoolhouse.
Shade trees throw odd symmetries
of shadow to damp ground, where she
lays down her head, crown through the spine’s
knots, to the trap of incarnation.
Teenaged boys mimic a crippled woman’s
stumbling gait, but at least they are laughing, v
I think, and we are safe, one woman asleep,
one sentinel awake. I see her shift,
my sleeping, younger self. Tangled in a cave
of sleep, she lays her body on the body of the map,
sinks stolid roots to Roman roads.
Plowing straight and deep, she covers places
where we failed each other, by cinder and maul,
cannon, treaty, and marriage, covering
towns whose names still wound the tongue,
where no one sleeps with both eyes closed.
“Sleeping Underground in a Krakaw Park” published in Poems for the Pardoned by Cathryn Hankla. Copyright © 2002 by Cathryn Hankla. All rights reserved.
Cathryn Hankla is the author of five previous collections of poetry, including Negative History and Texas School Book Depository. She is professor of English at Hollins University and poetry editor for the Hollins Critic.
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