What Good is Heaven

by Raye Hendrix

Texas Review Press, 2024

Paper: $21.95

Genre: Poetry

Reviewed by Jason Gordy Walker

 

Cover of WHAT GOOD IS HEAVEN by Raye Hendrix. The cover image shows a grey-scale illustration of a dragon-like creature flying in clouds.
Born in Birmingham and raised in Pinson, Alabama, Raye Hendrix, a poet and disability scholar, has penned a debut collection chock-full of Southern poems that buck against societal, familial, religious, and gender norms. Hendrix’s previous work includes two chapbooks—Every Journal is a Plague Journal and Fire Sermons, both published in 2021—plus short stories and nonfiction pieces online. Selected for The TRP Southern Poetry Breakthrough Series by poet-editor J. Bruce Fuller, What Good is Heaven clocks in at approximately 108 pages of poems, which would be too long for most debut poets, but Hendrix maintains a sense of propulsion. No wonder our state’s strongest poets, such as Rose McLarney, Adam Vines, and others, have praised her book—she knows the South as well as any poet writing today.

Hendrix chronicles queer experiences in rural spaces without sugar-coating them. The speakers often internalize fear and anger, and with good reason, yet such reflection results not in hatred nor narcissistic projection but in a mature, melancholic understanding of the world’s cruelty. In the first of four sections, the poem “There Were Daisies” balances straightforward statements (“I am born again every day”) with subtle undertones (“There were daisies, I think, / on the table. The carpet smelled / of dryer sheets and clove”). Hendrix hooks the reader’s attention as if it were a perch, then reels it in to the middle stanza, and a shock ensues: “I told my mother I wanted / to love a woman, and in answer / she told me about the rape—”; in lesser hands, such a stanza would toss the poem into the murky waters of melodrama, but here the speaker’s matter-of-fact voice prevents such a pitfall. The final stanza repeats the title, bringing the focus back to the poem’s beginning. A great poet once told me something along the lines of, “A good poem is a rereading machine.” A poem must be so finetuned as to cause the reader to reread it over and over. Hendrix’s poem accomplishes such a goal with clear, spare language. No gimmicks. No pompous speechifying.

“Letter Never Sent to a Once-Lover on the Coast” is thoroughly Southern—referencing Mardi Gras, the Mobile Mystics ball, Bayou La Batre, Birmingham, Dauphin Island, the Mobile Bay Jubilee—and unabashedly queer in its honesty. Writing to a past, same-sex, secret lover, the speaker recounts bittersweet memories: “…drank too much and took / my dress off in the bathroom. Sent you a picture / of the cheap gold garter advertising Carnivale / on my thigh. I said, come help me earn my beads. / You never came….”; “…your bikini-watching brother saw us risk a kiss / behind the sail. We begged him not to tell / and he agreed, but only if we swore to buy him booze….” The speaker’s humor and self-awareness define her voice. Although a solid amount of ego comes through, it doesn’t veer into navel-gazing. The poem concerns itself just as much with the external (“ungathered shells,” “a panic of shellfish,” “snapping shrimp,” “tall walls of whispering sea oats”) as with the internal. With her quirky eye for detail, Hendrix excels at writing love poems of depth and sincerity—a rare accomplishment for such a young poet.

In “Catalog of Acceptable Violence,” an elegy dedicated to Nicholas Hawkins (a teenager murdered in 2016 in Walker County, Alabama, for simply being bisexual), Hendrix reports on “the neighbor boys / firing pellet guns / at feral cats”—and paints a grotesque picture of a masculinity gone wrong: “their trophies in the bruises / and the blood.” Instead of preaching to her readers, she employs memorable visual imagery that moves them to empathize with the marginalized. Hendrix is not an Imagist, but they have read (and applied) aspects of Pound’s “A Few Don’ts by an Imagiste.”

What Good is Heaven successfully examines family life, the natural world, and animals. In “Skinning the Fox,” the speaker watches her father’s “…large / hands shaving skin from pink / meat….” She describes how “[t]he body sways as he slices, / an inconsistent pendulum / marking time it will not see…”; such actions may come across as tortuous, but both father and offspring understand the harsh reality of rural living, the inevitability of death. If the father had not shot the fox, it would have continued “…wreaking havoc in the hen house, the goat pen, / stealing chickens and killing kids.” The speaker of this poem and others—such as “Blood in the Milk,” a moving narrative-lyric in which a cow loses her calf—develops compassion for animals, at times relating to them as closely as kin. Other meaningful poems include “Sermon,” “The Heron,” “Southern Thesaurus,” “Pinson,” and the title poem. Although they do not write traditionally metrical verse, Hendrix often constructs pulsating rhythmic patterns (assonantal, rhetorical, visual) that intermingle with strategic enjambments, stirring the reader’s senses. Here is a poet who appreciates the value of surprise. During a time when so many younger poets are obsessing over social media and vapid celebrity culture, I am relieved to read one whose feet move through the grass, the dirt, the water.

 

Jason Gordy Walker is a poet, prose writer, and translator who lives in Alabama. His reviews and interviews have appeared or are forthcoming in Asymptote, Birmingham Poetry Review, Poetry Northwest, and elsewhere. He has received support from the New York State Summer Writers Institute, Newnan Art Rez, and other institutions, and holds an MFA from the University of Florida.