Over two books, both published by The Waywiser Press, Eric McHenry has built up a world of poetry that’s at once lighthearted and serious, cantankerous and comical. It’s populated with lullabies and villanelles and references that defy easy category—ranging from, for instance, Kansas history to early hip-hop to baseball to Sam Cooke lyrics to true crime stumpers to economic theory—the list goes on. His formal rigor keeps the work from sprawling, and sometimes he fits syntax to stanza, and speech to meter, in that sturdy inevitable-seeming, and plainspoken register we haven’t heard much since Auden, Larkin, Brooks, or Hayden. His first book, Potscrubber Lullabies, begins with a poem on coming home, a little bit to the speaker’s surprise; a few lines on time’s passing, a song of wondering elegy in subtly rhyming stanzas:
After Beloit I went back to the paper
and wrote arts features for eight dollars an hour,
and lived in the Gem Building, on the block between
Topeka High with its Gothic tower
and the disheveled Statehouse with its green
dome of oxidizing copper.
