Cage of WaterPaperback, 30 November 2004

The poems in Dennis Hinrichsen's Cage of Water explore collisions of spirit and matter, that thorn-and-thistle bath as he states in the book's final poem, where the limitations and entanglements of the flesh give over to provisional and sometimes fractured radiance and everlasting. This radiance takes many forms---an uncle with Down Syndrome calling out the makes of cars through the hrsh lght, Gds lght, faltring ner th crwn of the skul; a woman's neck cords flaring, leaping out in muscular form, fluted/arc/briefly held instant; his father sleeping, bird cry/pouring/out of him/like string/or/knotted rain as the narrator resists waking him and lets mosquitoes feed. Confronted with the natural world, Hinrichsen peers closely at such things as mules standing in the rain, the flight of a swallowtail, or cloudwork lighting the weave of trout and fashions uncanny threadings of self and other. Throughout the book, Hinrichsen transcends the bright, beautiful cage of the senses in lines and stanzas that are alert to the fluidity and exactness of perception to find the measureless silk of our common existence.