Raye Hendrix’s poetry collection “What Good is Heaven” offers nuanced portrait of rural America
“Let my girlhood smell / of shit and seed and hay”
By Martins Deep
Raye Hendrix stuns with a breathtaking leap into their debut full length collection of poetry. “What Good Is Heaven” follows their previous chapbooks, “Fire Sermons” and “Every Journal is a Plague Journal.” Published as part of the TRP Southern Poetry Breakthrough Series, a literary initiative spotlighting exceptional emerging authors from each state in the southern United States, this amazing book sets a new standard for their work by masterfully using craft elements that ranges from voice consistency, emotional authenticity, cultural relevance, movement, and originality
“What Good Is Heaven” is divided into four parts, each concerned with their dominant subject matter that captures a range of themes on family, identity, faith, nature and love. This body of work is brutal with honesty and a strong memorable impact Rose McLarney says “are like the splinter of glass she describes driven into a heel—they’ll stay with you.”. Among the literary elements that stands out in this collection is the poet’s diction, clarity, conciseness, imagery, nuance and sensory details which brings to mind their response in an interview with the poetry editors of Rappahannock Review: “I tend to think of a poem like a picture—it’s a snapshot of a moment in time.”
The lead poem, “Morning Song” plays the crucial role of introducing the reader to the poet's voice and style, establishes the collection's themes and tone, provides context for the rest of the collection, and represents the collection as a whole. It is a strong opening poem for its memorable imageries, and emotional resonance achieved in the exploration of grief, loss and the fragility of life, which doubtlessly rewards re-reading. In this poem, the poet begins with the word, “listen”, effective in opening the ears of the reader for a deeper appreciation of the collection’s aural appeal. It is a fact that this sonic skill employed by the poet enhances the overall musicality, emotional impact, and meaning of the poems. Examples of these are; “Across the street, the useless lake / shriveled to shallows like a pool of slick / black oil in the night” (pg. 72), “I have always been / the rough-pocked bitter pit of peach” (pg. 107), and “a string looped around / a loose tooth” (pg. 62).
The preceding poems ride stately on the spirit invoked by the opening poem. The poems continue to feature nature through photographic lens, and in very high resolution. As one journeys through the poems, we find not just acknowledgements on the existence of the mundane, but a kind of transcendence achieved through the use of personification. A few examples of this can be found in, “What the Water Left Behind”(pg. 15), with lines like, “the waves / betrayed the boats in Mobile Bay”, and in “Surfacing” (pg. 17), where the poet creatively animates “the sun” as having “the chance / to rub the fog from its eyes”. This is also an excellent proof of a poet in tune with their environment.
The shifts from one subject matter to the next also shows movement that goes beyond the inner workings of individual poems, to the collection as a whole. The reader is carried through the pictures of animals, introduces and familiarizes us with the reoccurring daughter persona, and that daughter’s relationship with their father, then into a romantic one with their partner as seen in “Letter Never Sent to a Once Lover on the Coast”. The poem also touches on faith, using both playful, raw and unapologetic mode of expressions to communicate their belief or unbelief, and ends on the poem the title of the collection was drawn from.
The author is commendable for sharing in their complicated love of the South, and for their gentle invitation through doorways cut into photographs in their exhibition of experience and memory. “What Good Is Heaven” shines in the many gems it is made of; too numerous to mention. This is one fine bestiary with the cover of an ageless hymnal, too beautiful for no other feeling but wonder.
