Ordinary Sun

by Matthew Henriksen

Black Ocean, 2011

120 pages / $15  Buy from SPD

Matthew Henriksen’s book, a beautiful yellow with a lovely orange orb on the cover, is aptly named, and when I first read it, I thought: “Blake! William Blake!” And of course, I was not entirely wrong, for Blake’s vision, his sense of wanting the writer to be essentially Romantic, revolutionary and ultimately Christian (though in an idiosyncratic way) is part of this book’s ethos. But to assume that one poet—now just a name to many—can influence a complex and intricate book about waking and sleep, vision and its oblivious counterpart, is perhaps misguided. On rereading, I find echoes of the canon and what also is not included there; I find places where Henriksen’s guided eye finds a way to relish the negative, and I think of theory, just a little: the series of “short-circuits” that someone like Slavoj Žižek would want us to find in something like a parallax view, the view “from both sides” of a picture or a noetic gap. This is what I think Henriksen is doing, ultimately, and I relish the intricacies of such poems that wonder with presence and absence inextricably connected by the beauty of the images that Henriksen employs. “What is love but a negative collaboration?” (“Afterlife Ending as a Question”).

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