Rucksacks for the Leaf Cat by Dianna Henning

 

Dianna Henning‘s Rucksacks for the Leaf Cat is a rucksack filled with treasures for poetry lovers. We find something for every mood. Every page is carefully wrought, so all that’s left is a crystalline poem. For immediate and lasting book pleasure.

–Grace Cavalieri, Maryland’s tenth Poet Laureate

 

To enter Dianna Henning‘s poems is to enter a natural world that is both realistically and metaphorically described, and which also leaves you “standing on the rim of the infinite.” To stand there is to experience the world from the inside out, for as she writes “I was once touched / by such a stone and because / of that I turned human. // But first, I was stone.” Henning’s is an elemental language in the tradition of Rilke, Gluck and Ada Limon, a language that embraces us as we embrace it. The stakes here are lost loves, death, family, and various yearnings, and it is her generous vision where “thoughts become dancing birds, / and the writer at the desk, /a wide-open sky” that gives us an essential and gorgeous poetry that renews us.

–Richard Jackson, author of The Heart as Framed: New and Select Poems

 

Dianna Henning‘s personal truth carrying poems intertwine nature and human landscapes. Her words speak of the grit and grief moments in a life being well lived. We are on a journey with her as we feel the ache of what love is, encounter challenges of the greater world, and look to survive the high stakes of living. In the end we witness the resilience of carrying on. “I’ve learned to listen with my mouth.”/To make words with wings.”/ “To carry myself without fear of what’s ahead.”/ These poems lift and move us.

–Lara Gularte, El Dorado County Poet Laureate Emeritus,  Author of Kissing the Bee & Fourth World Woman

 

I have admired Dianna Henning‘s poetic insights since we were MFA students together in Vermont. I always envied the delicacy and grace of her lines that veiled their melded strength. In this volume, she explains the heart of her craft by writing “My throat is a winding river / where words carry me / into the sanctity of all.” Luscious scenes of love mingle with the laments of grief, the revulsion of war. Yet Dianna eloquently blends all these images with the songs she creates. “I’ve learned to make words with wings,” she writes, as she instructs us how her “thoughts become dancing birds.”

–Sara Lindsay Rath, MacDowell Fellow and author of several books  published by the University of Wisconsin Press

 

If “dark’s no trouble, except when you’re in the thick of it” then this book beautifully examines all the layers of darkness and how it collaborates with the light. There is an unfolding of the themes of loss, war, our natural world and living in times of war, both internal and external. In these pages, your will find lava flows, the Yuba River, Vermont backwoods, moths from Madagascar, and wooden knobs that tell stories of the wind. Each poem finds “a certain quiet that rises” and in that quiet, we may find ourselves “threading sunlight across a mountainous terrain.”

–Connie Post, Author of Prime Meridian and Between Twilight

 

https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/dianna-mackinnon-henning/rucksacks-for-the-leaf-cat/