Hendricks, R.F. The Hatcheller. Atlanta: Hendricks House II, 2002. 184 pp.

At the end of a whimsical little poem about eating a bowl of rice and milk for breakfast in the presence of his amused, supercilious children, R.F. Hendricks conjures his family’s domesticated phantom of West Virginia:

… its ragged, panhandled shape
somehow scratched or torn
into the back-lit cloth
of my bedside lampshade—
that eerie icon seeming
to make light that way
of any one of us
ever getting away,
ever truly getting away.

These few lines suggest not only Hendricks’s formal wit and comfortable thematic range but also his ability to rein in sentiment with clear-eyed observation. His polished equivocation—“to make light that way”—dodges the cliché “No pun intended!” by studiously intending it, carefully poising a quiet lament for whatever in the mountains might have been oppressive or narrow or “ragged” over against the firm, proud recognition of what “any one of us” is.

Poems in The Hatcheller have garnered praise from such distinguished poets as Amy Clampitt, James Merrill, and J.D. McClatchy, not to mention a characteristically thoughtful foreword by Turner Cassity, who makes a few side-feints to slash at Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Emily Dickinson, to Hendricks’s advantage. Even when he imitates the playful rhythms and distinctive imagery of Theodore Roethke (or is it also John Donne?), we hear that Hendricks voice:

Love’s out on a limb;
who’ll climb the tree?
The branches arch, green and trim,
the leaves are spread openly.
For whom will love be brought to ground?
For whom the bed be made?

The Hatcheller is divided into six parts: “Some Lives”; “Circumstances”; “Occasions”; “Conditions”; “Translations” of Horace, Heine, Baudelaire, Rilke, Brecht, and Lorca; and “Children’s Poems” (let us recall that Roethke also enjoyed writing children’s verse). The title poem establishes Hendricks’s vision of the poet as a comber and refiner of flax, of raw materials drawn out by hand to discrete threads whose gathered skeins are wrought like the intercrossed histories of families and all our memory—“circumstances” and “conditions” inextricable from “some lives.”

“Late Lament for My Father’s Cousin, Auttie,” quick-sketches the plight and tenuous success of many immigrants’ trying to assimilate:

In pieces, Auttie took from other men
an air, a jumble of words, a joke or two,
a blustering manner, insecure—until,
at forty, he could pass for one of us.

In the poignant details of Auttie’s struggle, Hendricks limns the cumulative difficulties of simply making a living, as well as having to survive in a world of otherness. Despite Cassity’s slighting of Edgar Lee Masters as an “embalmer” of characters, I think Hendricks echoes that good—though narrow—poet in an honorable American task: to show the “foreign” threads of both our society’s content and its discontent. Auttie “married young, / and tried to farm; did plumbing on the side. / He felt some need to cry his human cry.”

In patient, elucidative, sometimes luminous craft, Ron Hendricks keeps practicing poetry, exploring the tonalities of his own human cry, its ancestries and its factual phantoms.

Robert W. Hill