Erosion, Nancy A. Henry’s latest chapbook by Moon Pie Press, is reminiscent of times past, before television and computers, a time when lovers might have spent nights rollicking through moonlit gardens or indulging in the heady pleasures of the boudoir. Nancy’s full-color collage on the book’s cover is dream-like; vintage imagery so delicious that butterflies have landed all over it - on a love letter, on a naked woman’s waist. Here we see a broken, antique pocket watch, tantalizing us with the idea of a world governed not by mechanical ticking but rather the natural ebb and flow of the seasons:
The deer are in velvet now
The earth in the flux of melt and freeze
That green wood doesn’t throw off much heat
I hear the whispered sizzle of its green blood,
My tea grows cold too soon.
- from “Jane and Jacob”
Nancy is writing in the vein of Wordsworth and his Romanticist cohorts, brimming with song for the common person, lusting for the simplicity of flower and flesh. In her poem “To a Poor Woodcutter” she writes:
. . .eucalyptus, wisteria,
sweet pepperbush
green index of Eden
fragrance, incense
blossom of desire
stranger
I will lie with you
if you whisper their names
in darkness. . .
The title Erosion stands contrary to the eboullience of this collection, testifying that there is more impossibility in love “than in death itself”. Like the seasons, human relationships erode and are reborn, changing shape and meaning along the way. When Nancy writes of loss, she bows to and embraces its power as she would the power of the seasons, as a Pagan-minded soul accepts the cyclical nature of any living thing:
Lazarus, come,
I am in need of your healed and shining skin,
your fragrant, recreated hair,
your humming cells
radiant with the unmaking of the curse.
- from “Grave Clothes”
On the bookcover, the word Erosion is divided into the words Eros and Ion. Ions are charged subatomic particles, unstable atoms that are either delirious with having too much of what they need, or even worse, not enough. An ion can only be at rest once it bonds with another.
It’s an apt play on words. The title seems to be hinting that our yearning for physical and spiritual connection is foretold by our very atoms. Walt Whitman, a kindred spirit, wrote, “I am he that aches with amorous love; Does the earth gravitate? does not all matter, aching, attract all matter? So the body of me to all I meet or know.”
These poems are imbued with a sensual honesty, inviting the reader to “be my Chagall lover / float with me above a small chaotic town / our silks and fingers tangled up together / in a storm of crabapple blossoms.” Intimacy is evident in a breath, a whisper, the smell of a lover’s pillow. This is the altar of the body, mind, and spirit; the small worlds that swell and crumble with a kiss.
