untitled ocean
by Stephen Hemenway
This essential collection moves the reader from the elegiac to a poetry in which, with a photographer’s eye, we “hold reality still for observation.” Grief is mitigated by a lyric repositioning of the physical self in slowed time, precisely noting patterns in the human body as well as in urban and natural landscapes, all with cycles of rising, falling, and rising once more. These deeply felt and quietly stunning poems ask us to focus with “attention/intimacy and/pleasure in looking.” And look we do, the poetry leading us to see what we might too often ignore, finding beauty in even the most subtle shift of a stranger’s shoulder. Taking the world-through-words apart and reappraising, playing with syntax and form as a way to note our transience, how “yet we are and we aren’t,” these perceptive mediations are invitations to a sense of renewal. Breathe, observe, and breathe in again with this poet’s language. Hemenway invites us to journey from a place of profound loss to one of possibility, a place we want to be, where “even the whiteness of the paper is sunlight.”
—Susanne Dyckman
Stephen Hemenway’s subtle, acutely observed poems bring phenomena and feeling into tidal relation: rising and falling, opening and closing, light and dark, movement and stasis. The reader comes to recognize the human—indeed the cosmic—tempo as not merely “discreet and also discrete” but also as a “turbulent cloud” which like breath or wave can carry larger currents. Hemenway registers the world as we know it: pandemic, war, fire. And in several poems, he disperses rhythm and sound across multiple voices, capturing the human syncopations of hope and grief. But the essential pulse of these poems is manifest in the way that sight looks inward. In that boundless space, the “untitled” ocean becomes the “united” ocean, which mysteriously allows us to “drift and bob past the edges of the frame.”
—Elizabeth Robinson