Henning, Sara. Burn: Poems. Southern Illinois University Press, 2024. 74 pp. $18.95

In the essay “In Search of a Language” from her 1995 book Object Lessons: The Life of the Woman and the Poet in Our Time, Eavan Boland posits that “[T]here is a defining moment which comes early in a poet’s life. A moment full of danger. It happens at the very edge of becoming a poet, when behind there is nothing but the mute terrain where, until then, a life has been lived and felt without finding its formalization.” In spending time with Burn by Sara Henning, readers will recognize the defining moments in the speaker’s life as those surrounded by flame, giving way to the duality of flame itself: destruction and rebirth, love and loss. But what endures, what comes after, is a book of strength, influence, and determination—Sara Henning’s Burn is a field map that guides readers through the flames to find the clearing, and time and time again, the clearing is defined by love.

In the opening poem, “Galveston, Texas,” Henning begins with an arresting image:

            When Brown Pelicans torpedo

            the Texas coast, flare their gular pouches

            to sieve for prawns, they look

            like bombs falling from the sky.

            Tell me the world is on the verge

            of ending, and I’ll believe you.

The raw nature of the birds renders the speaker “sea-shocked” and, further still, “[E]ven the wind// seems complicit, brutalizing dunes,” allows the reader to recognize the full magnitude of power in this poem. An early thread in Henning’s book is the impact of naming—this is revealed through the “warlike names” of the pelicans: “pod, squadron, fleet—”; as such, this thread stitches an enduring focus and command to Henning’s poems.  Speaking of naming, there are many influences weaving through Burn – book and section epigraphs ranging from Delmore Schwartz to Tennessee Williams to Toni Morrison provide glimmers of insight into the poet and the poems. As an epigraph lover myself, they are streaks of light through the window blinds, but reach the window and open the blinds and behold: a profound, meaningful experience awaits. Speaking of light—one poem I keep returning to is “A Brief History of Light.” Written across eleven tercets, Henning opens with another striking image:

            They will always be love letters,

            closed caption letters unspooling across

            the TV My mother, hard of hearing,

            watched her stories in silence.

            Guiding Light, One Life to Live,

            living room lit by two Tiffany lamps.

Simply put, there’s great tenderness to Henning’s words here, and the love in this poem is palpable. The Tiffany lamps also certainly shine in the speaker’s memory, as Henning writes further:

            How many times did I stare into

            a lampshade, its luster blunted through

            coiled bronze and blown favrile

            the canopy of glass in rich charade

            all night?

Favrile glass, which was patented by Louis Comfort Tiffany in the late 1890s, is revered for its hand-crafted nature which, in turn, adds depth to this poem even further still because of the precision and the focus wielded by Henning herself. Speaking of hand-crafted nature, Henning works magic as the poem’s landscape becomes the speaker’s youth:

            …I’m tilling mica from soil at recess,

            swearing it would catch fire in my hands.

            I imagined angels tunneling through

            layers of earth, catching their wings

            on oak roots, bricks, and those little wounds

            lodging there, waiting for me

            to dig them up with sticks.

For as much as the poem is about light, the poem can also serve as a field map for faith. The author notes in the back of the book indicate this poem nods to Billy Collins’s titular poem from Questions about Angels (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1991); arguably, that poem itself is a tongue-in-cheek meditation on how angels pass their time, as well as the healing power of dance. Conversely in Henning’s poem, by imagining angels coming from the ground as opposed to the sky, the readers of this poem can feel the speaker’s swelling pride in uncovering “Goody’s barrettes” which makes the poem’s close—one that brings those lamps that lit up the living room earlier in the poem—into the speaker’s possession even more rewarding. To me, this poem alludes to Eavan Boland’s defining moment I spoke to earlier and, further still, Boland writes “all the rough surfaces give way to the polish and slip of language.” In Burn, the rough surfaces of Henning’s poems are often rife with flames, embers, and ashes.

However, to continue the metaphor, the memories locked in this poem are like that of kindling, but here’s where Henning’s strength to wield and operate language allows for a sense of healing, of understanding, that may not have been there in the initial formation of the memory. That is because, through the unearthing of seemingly miniscule trinkets like barrettes, a closer reading reveals the healing happens through the uncovering and the unearthing. That, just as well, could be the poet’s work: to uncover and unearth. And, as such, this notion speaks volumes to exploration Henning does in not just this poem but the poems in Burn as a whole.

That’s where the healing happens.

Speaking of healing, the last poem I want to touch on before I close this review is “Drive-In Nights”; the poem is a kind of sestina-like variation, especially with its word repetition and tercet envoy that closes the poem. The poem opens with a Dorianne Laux line which, just as well, could speak to the book’s intent:  

           you know love when you see it,

           you can feel its lunar strength, its brutal pull.  

As a lover of words, Laux’s use of brutal strikes me just as a recurring word in Henning’s poem strikes me, too: mercy. Given the context of the poem, watching Die Hard with a loved one, the speaker in this poem opened my heart with this question: “Who would save us now?” And further still my heart opened with the braiding of the poem’s narrative structure:

            I can’t resist a man who’d kill

            for his woman, a Johnny-come-lately who mercies

            no one. I married you, husband, when you side

            -swiped my heart. Terrorists fire,

            take hostages. Hans Gruber calls shots. Once, we caught fire

            when we touched. In the fury of summer, got hitched.

            We’ve fought, loved, made up in continuous cycles.

The fusion of movie plot with life story is revelatory, and what’s striking to me is the poem’s directness. As a teacher I once had would say, the poem wastes no steps. This poem encompasses the love and passion, the intensity and desire, which speaks to the collection as a whole. Henning is also keenly aware of the poetic line here, offering exciting dual meanings and thoughtful lines. This poem makes me think of a Galway Kinnell line I had taped to my writer’s desk for some time: “the secret title of every good poem might be ‘Tenderness.’”

I would wager Kinnell’s adage rings true for many of Henning’s poems housed in Burn.

Burn is a book that interrogates how love takes shape in our lives – and the book’s range is a testament to the effort Sara Henning put into curating this text. I admire, with great regularity, her exploration of form because these moments are where Henning herself wields flame and creates enduring poems like “Stealing Ariel” and “A Brief History of Fire” that also anchor the book.

Simply put, Sara Henning’s Burn is a rewarding and nourishing book.