Linda Benninghoff
Departures

Milk Crates

They are picking up the milk crates
in this store, whose owners I know,
placing them in rows
in the grey backroom
to sleep, neatly,
with empty potato sacks
a few green-printed boxes,
things too well made to be useless,
though they can’t find uses for them right away.

On a corner on Broadway
I found him, that week in November,
my one-time friend from a religious retreat,
sitting on a milk-crate,
under a ledge which just kept out the rising rain.
He talked to me with eyes rolled back,
his hands in the pockets of a green coat I remembered,
as he told me,
it was a way of life he’d almost chosen
and the raining streets,
people who passed quickly
were more real to him
than what he’d had
eight months ago, in March,
sitting on a lawn and talking
about God and the meaning of dreams.

In the supermarket
I measured the time it took them,
to unpack the gold and brown potatoes from the sacks,
the pale tomatoes and winter apples,
the milk from crates,
throwing out the loose paper
and saving the rest for strange uses, like my friend’s.

ISBN 1-59661-011-5
39 pages $9
Linda Benninghoff grew up on Long Island and spent about 20 years in the Huntington area. She graduated with honors from Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore.

She has a graduate degree in English with an emphasis on creative writing from SUNY at Stony Brook. In her spare time she does animal rights advocacy and is active in the Fund for Animals and the Humane Society. She has published widely in journals and anthologies. Recently she translated The Seafarer from Anglo-Saxon. Her other chapbook is The Street Where I Was a Child.

Review on Compulsive Reader
The title gives a clue to the tone of this collection. Departure, parting and the ultimate separation, death, occupy the forefront of these poems. There is a substratum of suppressed narrative in that each poem presupposes an untold story with which an individual poem resonates.

Reviewed by Bob Williams

Departures
by Linda Benninghoff
March Street Press 2004, ISBN 1-59661-011-5, $9.00, 39 pages
     This is an unusually handsome chapbook, perfect bound instead of saddle stitched and with fourteen photographs by Robert Bixby, editor of March Street Press. These have been cleverly manipulated to be textured, impressionistically lacking in detail and inviting to the lingering eye. There are nineteen poems and these range in length from a dozen lines to over two pages.
     This is the second chapbook of Linda Benninghoff whose work has appeared in numerous publications. She is a graduate of John Hopkins University and SUNY at Stony Brook. She is involved also in animal rights. She has in addition to her chapbooks translated ‘The Seafarer’ and the translation is available at www.electrato.com, under Dialogue of Nations through Poetry in Translation. This has the merit of completeness and is a distinct improvement over the gnarly version by Ezra Pound.
     The title gives a clue to the tone of this collection. Departure, parting and the ultimate separation, death, occupy the forefront of these poems. There is a substratum of suppressed narrative in that each poem presupposes an untold story with which an individual poem resonates. The language is appropriately sober and uncomplex. It has the ease of narrative but the interest and difficulty of a story untold but which can to a degree be guessed. The position of the poems between the extremes of fact and emotion is nicely calculated.
     Benninghoff is technically assured and does some dangerous things. This is the opening of the longest poem, ‘There is no stillness.’

There is no stillness
in the room we left empty.
The broken kettle
does not sputter like an engine,
and Michael
who one day wore drag
the next left for Kentucky
on a job
checking air conditioners
with a waitress
he’d picked up
the night before,
to marry, is gone.

     Here, boys and girls, is the violation of all those things that we learned at our mother’s knee about proper word order but how effective it is, how cubist in effect.
     Some of the lines, because they are members of a secret narrative, slip into prose of notable flatness but the sustained ability to produce phrases with words of the correct weight and color is observed solicitously. The shortness of the lines makes this kind of verbal measurement especially critical.
     This is work of quality and of interest to all who love poetry. Although somewhat tentative in its engagements, it will repay attention and perusal.
Used with permission from Compulsive Reader