Revenance [Paperback]

By turns elegiac, ecopoetic, and impolitic, Cynthia Hogues eighth collection,Revenance,is a condensery of empathic encounters with others and otherness. Hogue coins a wordfromrevenant, French for ghostto consider questions of life and afterlife, and to characterize the ways in which the people and places we love return to us, and return us to ourselves, holding us to account. The poems ofRevenancecontain telling touchstone figures, like a guide named Blake who, noting signs of global warming, will speak of spirits but not angels; a man who dies and is brought back to life by the imaginative power of love; and a woman who can speak the language of endangered trees. While writing these poems, Hogue journeyed often across country to her familial roots in upstate New York in order to help care for her dying father. At last she began to record some of the many stories she heard of mysterious encounters and visitations, such as she herself was soon to witness, over several intensive years. Although grief silvers the threads of these poems, Hogue pares away the personal in order to be present to others in a fiercely engaged and innovative poetry.

The pitch of language can isolate image almost against memory, but as an instrument of its music. This is done across Hogues new collection,Revenance, with an almost abstract, muralistic importance. I do love these poemshere is the balance of both color and flower naming the rose.
Norman Dubie
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Cynthia Hogues irony exists on the page of her poems as a profoundly gentle nudge to the spirit beyond the pagean acknowledgement that the world in all its glorious, fragile wonder is nonetheless a locus of grief and longing. For Hogue, the poem is a place of partial, and therefore always vulnerable, utterancean impossible place that we arrive at in spite of ourselves . . . as she puts it, a mystery / of frond fern / gorse a magic / to which / I relate tothose line brlC˜