Trim Reckonings

From Shylock to the hucklebuck (the dance craze of his adolescence) to an epic "Funky Robot," DeWitt Henry's poems are openhearted, witty, often rueful, in loving argument with literature and with what it means to be human-and with meaning itself. Profound and often profoundly, wryly funny, Trim Reckonings asks questions poems don't seem to have asked before, and leaves this reader in wonder.

--Gail Mazur, Author of Land's End: New and Selected Poems

ï»ï»ï»In this stunning new collection, DeWitt Henry reckons with a past that is personal, familial, and cultural as well as the present dysfunction of American political life. His narratives and portraits are drawn and colored by candid and resonant observations. Henry is a poet who both sees the larger landscape and the struggles of the individual figures at play within it. Additionally, Henry draws upon his insights into literary figures and their characterizations, for Trim Reckonings is a reader's reckoning as well as a writer's! These are hard-won, earned, poems of passionate engagement.

-- Stuart Dischell, Author of The Lookout Man

ï»ï»"Are scars proof of wounds / or of healing?" So asks DeWitt Henry's splendid second book of poems, Trim Reckonings. The personal family drama of Henry's youth-adultery, alcoholism, disappointments-is set against the historical backdrop of the post-WW II America. The funny tumble and tumult of objects and heirlooms-a dismantled German gas mask, a clear plastic Nixon Halloween mask, a carved coconut pirate head, a collapsible top hat, each one evokes (for me) a memory and a revelation. They are not just a stroll through nostalgia's flea market but are uncanny and relevant under Henry's witty gaze. These primarily meditative poems are presented as jazzy, charged, inventive, literary riffs, yet one can see through the delightful verbal high-jinx and sleight-of-hand surfaces to the darker subjects underneath-the "scars" (psychological and historical) that are the anchor and the heart of this rich collection.

--Jane Shore, Author of That Said

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