Book Review

Abstract

Henning shows how our lives are rooted in the physical, in the hungers and thirsts we share with the doe and buck, that our very imagining of the “silvered wolf” makes him “the heart’s centerpiece.” The natural world beyond our fences reminds us of our mistake, of the “fracture” that grew because we have “forgotten the wholeness of the world.” Faithfully, the world remains, calling us; the animals “continue to weep” as separation brings suffering to all. In Henning’s poems, healing the fracture comes with attention and intent, seeing the doe’s hunger, and the coyote’s, watching the transformation from serving and satisfying hunger into the doe’s “burst of radiant being.” In “Exchange,” her sister watches a doe dying in the aftermath of a coyote attack. The poem becomes a kind of magical spell, where the deer returns as a trout, its side marked by spots that were the coyote’s teeth marks, marks that the