Some Other Wet Landscape

Poetry. The woman is singing and talking to you and she is urgent. This ‘whittled woman / this battered blue fragment’ has traveled far, has burst through harsh iterations of time and experience. In searing poems carried from the wreckages of marriage, of trauma-memory, of self-doubt toxic as glue, of once-sacred homes now vanished, McEniry’s craft stays steady. Tough cadences and syllabic rigor thread themselves inside magic and enchanting music in a daughter’s Sunday meal, a sea floor, a community of poets, and a ‘honey-mint whisper / of eucalyptus.’ There’s more: wit and bite in the short lyrics a la Stevie Smith; and sound-bursts inside the spacious prose poems. Just when we’re certain all is revealed of this wise and quirky soul-spirit-traveler, here comes young Eros, intoxicated by a lover’s hair and a dove high in a tree where the poet declares: ‘I built the foundation of my summer / on her creation.’ This debut is a rare gift.–Judith Vollmer