Phenomena: Poems

When poet and novelist Cathryn Hankla, now a professor of English at Hollins University, was 23 years old, she won first place in a national poetry competition—an award that led to the publication of her first book of poetry, Phenomena: Poems, in 1983. Featuring poems that focus on describing the seemingly indescribable, Hankla’s themes range from the opposition of night and day, to the conflict between dreaming and waking lives, to the surreal experience of almost seeing something just out of view. All of these are, in her terminology, “phenomena” that haven’t yet been adequately portrayed.

Hankla’s style is maximalist, relying on a variety of literary devices. She uses layered imagery that at times contradicts itself or makes her descriptions unclear and hard to follow—coupled with the fact that her poems lack a narrative structure, this distancing effect forces the reader to pay closer attention. Although Hankla eschews the metric and rhyming forms of traditional poetry, her poems rely on syncopation, rhythm, repetition, and internal rhymes that complicate the relationships between the lines and demonstrate her sense of language.

The imagery in the poems primarily comes from nature, with varied landscapes and details that tend to avoid clichéd references. In Hankla’s view, nature is removed and coldly neutral—beautiful, but with a savage streak.



A survey of a few of the poems in the collection follows.

The opening poem, “A Tunnel to the Moon,” is chaotic and disorienting—a purposeful effect that attempts to describe the feeling of sudden epiphany in the midst of the mundane:

You are bending down, getting under white cotton socks, you are
finding false angel wings.
It is like hearing an airplane touch down,
or your first sudden notice of spring.



“Nothing is Obvious” again repeats the theme of surprising revelation, this time using the metaphor of a magician whose illusions go from the often-repeated pulling a dove seemingly from thin air to the truly creative and unexpected—using the feathers of the bird from one trick to “construct another bird” as the audience watches.

Several of the poems rely on descriptions of running water, using them as similes for memory, as in “Answering the Past,” or the guilt of discovering one’s true nature and being disappointed, as in “The Water is the Skin of the River.” In “Swift Current,” the streaming thing ends up being a relationship that carries lovers along even while they realize they should not be together. The cocooning feeling of the current lulls them into complacency. On the other hand, the language of water is also used to describe emotionally fulfilling love in “Walking in the Path of the Moon,” where the meeting of water and air replicates the delicate touch of the beloved:

our language holds land on water; water
on air, air lifting lighter;
husband, wife. Each to each and linked
by touch.



The short poem “The Night Hunting” pivots from graceful depictions of nature to chronicling its violence. In it, a speaker watches flies cover the half-eaten carcass of a dead deer, unable to do much except witness the slow reabsorption of flesh. As the speaker stands in the rain, the deer decomposes almost on sight, “hooves to humus.” The only clue that this isn’t simply a matter of an aging mammal’s normal cycle of life comes at the end of the poem when the speaker notices “the carcass shedding bullets like blood”—this deer has been killed by previous observers, for whom the speaker has neither moral opprobrium nor praise.

Violence recurs in “The Fate of Making,” a poem in six parts that takes the reader from a section about dreams that recur so forcefully that the word “dream” itself is repeated over and over again, to a vision of coldblooded viciousness:

Driving, the blade separates
her ribs, reaches as far
as his arm can go. He keeps
his eyes on the dotted road



It isn’t clear whether the action is literal or simply a reflection of the damaged connection between the two people—an ambiguity that is sustained in the poem’s last sections and their mixture of scientific inquiry, astrological superstition, and the longing for a different and better life.

Not all the poems are equally disturbing and heavy. The strange and amusing “Volume 13: Jirasek to Lighthouses” takes as its subject matter the quirky pairings that are created when encyclopedias alphabetize their contents. When juxtaposed in this way, the poem suggests, all facts and ideas stop being fully real—they are instead phenomena poised “between realness and unrealness,” as the poem’s epigraph has it.