Skip to main content

Gypsy Queen by Nicole Hennessy, reviewed by Rusty Barnes

Nicole Hennessy
Gypsy Queen
Crisis Chronicles Press
2019
60 pages
$12

Nicole Hennessy's Gypsy Queen, #109 from Crisis Chronicles Press, is a representative small press text in many ways. Filled with free-verse poems that tend toward the long and discursive, the book is arranged in such a way that the poems' performative aspects are in full effect, with strong voice and lots of sound-play. In "Vultures," a poem in five short sections, the speaker says to the potential partner "Tell me everything about me./Leave no room for me to tell you." which is a nice effect, as potential partners in the beginning usually say "tell me everything about you," so it's an intriguing beginning. We know this speaker is all ego from the get-go, doubling down on that initial statement by confessing just a few lines farther down:

I knew we'd walk to that cemetery together
I wanted to tell you something about myself
through those streets alone, along which I'd grown
and still wander windingly in dreams. . .
. . .Told you I needed to center myself.
I was trying not to know I want to know you.

Section II begins. "My eyes are sunken boats, wrecked in their own stalls" and Hennessy continues with the water metaphor throughout the section and into section III then inexplicably drops it just as it begins to give the poem some power, in order to bring in the vultures of the title. Via the Mayan myth that says "vultures [are] consumers of death converted back to life" the speaker suggests that to see a vulture implies one should be patient and to think things through, presumably referring to the connection made at the beginning of the poem. This seems like a perfect opportunity for more water metaphor--cenotes perhaps--to connect this section to the previous two more fully, but the connection never fully fuses. Instead, Hennessy brings us back to the cemetery from the beginning and to some exits that are also entrances, in an ending that intrigues with its possibilities yet underwhelms at the same time. I'm damned if I know exactly what is happening in the poem, but I want to know more.

Unfortunately, this is a theme that continues through the remainder of the book: intriguing images, some wild metaphors, but many lines that strive toward complexity but say little, as in another long poem, "Sometimes the Sun."

Smoke another cigarette
suck synonyms
backup
report the exact facts
not lyric mirrored
reflect face
fuck

I respect the effort, but remain uncertain as to what, literally, is going on here and in many of the poems, and so I'm unable to commit fully to the poet's vision. I like Hennessy's way with language in spots, and in other poems I appreciate the insight, but the two elements don't coincide enough to entirely succeed. This is the way: some things resonate, some don't. Maybe these elements I've described appeal to you, and if so, you should give this book a shot. I wholly respect the effort. 3 of 5 stars.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Ed Dorn's # 22 From Twenty-four Love Poems

                                               from Jacket The strengthy message here in #22 of 24 Love Songs can be summed up in two lines: ['There is/no sense to beauty. . .' and '. . .How/ the world is shit/ and I mean all of it] What I also like about this brief poem is the interplay between the title of the book and the subject of the poems (love/anti-love (which is not hate)): it's all a mass of contradictions, like love. And I have to say that the shorter poems of the Love Songs and the last book he wrote before dying (Chemo Sábe) seem to me much better and more memorable than the Slinger/Gunslinger poems. These (generally) later poems probably attempt less stylistically, but are more sure-handed, hacked from a soap bar, maybe. Easy to use, but disappear after use. In any case, Dorn is well worth the reading and re-reading, for me, though he'll never become one of my favorites. And doesn't every poet want that, dead or alive? ;-) #22 The agony

Jim Daniels

Half Days My daughter, thirteen, pale shred of herself, fought an unidentified infection in her spine as it softened her discs into disappearance. I’d unread that story if she were young and still listened to lullabies. After she got discharged, I set an alarm for two a.m. each night to shoot antibiotics into her port while she slept, her limp arm resting in my hand. Her return to school: half days—follow my dotted line smearing across months of sleepless breadcrumbs— at noon I idled high, anxious in the school driveway rattling off the latest test results in the zero gravity of fear. She startled me with the brittle thunk of the car door slam, then snapped at me for staring at her friends as they strolled across the street to the cafeteria, creeping them out, she said, embarrassed by illness like hard acne or a blooming hickey, wrong music or flakey hair, or the tacky middle-school jumper she no longer had to wear. I was there to drive her to

Paul Blackburn and Sexism

How does one respond to sexism in poets whose work seems to be filled with it, like Blackburn? The quick answer most people would give is: ignore it. Yet here I am, reading more and more, and yes, enjoying, the supposedly sexist work of Paul Blackburn and wondering why there isn't much if any criticism of his important work in the late 50s and 60s, when he served as gatekeeper and recorder of many readings which have helped establish the avant-garde presence and reading scene in New York as well as given us great historical insight into the poets associated at that time with the New York scene.  And of course I'm thinking about his poems, which kept him in the middle of things as a talent in his own right. It's not difficult, unfortunately to see why he's not read, and that makes me sad. His poetry is worth more than a few cursory footnotes to the era. I've come to the conclusion now, after dipping into the collected poems at length, but randomly, and reading fo