unfinishing

by Brian Henderson

Overview

they come flying out from under your expectations / and once opened it is rain / and thinking a sandbar / always inventing a different script / never where you left it

This dream book of kaleidoscopic, holographic, mutagenic poems is haunted by the loops, aporias, and entanglements of time – memory, forgetting, oblivion, fortune telling, eternal (or not) returns, timelessness (however that may manifest), beginnings and endings (if indeed there are such things), and other spectral speculations where the intimate and the outward might exchange places.

With imagery both striking and nuanced, and language rich and strange, Brian Henderson encounters a hummingbird, a barred owl, a flood, a trapdoor, a table of contents, an empty rowboat, a nonexistent river, a room made of crystal, a heap of broken furniture, ecocatastrophe, and political debacle in mesmerizing poems that celebrate the strange and vertiginous musics of a kind of memory-ness invoked by the irretrievable.

These poems ask how the future can exist in the now, the now in the past. What is a future? How might we recognize one? And although the now may be completely empty, what are the selves we seem to become? In the archeology of now, unfinishing asks who we might have been – and who we might yet be.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780228012924
Publisher:	McGill-Queens University Press
Publication date:	04/15/2022
Series:	Hugh MacLennan Poetry Series , #67
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	120
File size:	613 KB

About the Author

Brian Henderson has published twelve previous volumes of poetry including Nerve Language, which was a finalist for the Governor General’s Literary Awards. He lives in Markdale, Ontario.

Brian Henderson has published twelve previous volumes of poetry including Nerve Language, which was a finalist for the Governor General’s Literary Awards.

Table of Contents

Prolepsis

Anicca a jan-ken 3

Vanishing houses

Apranihita 7

Vanishing houses 9

Lobelia cardinalis 10

Translations from an unknown language 11

Imaginary interval 12

Phantomancy 13

And if I look back 14

After all this time 15

Texts (at the end of the world) 17

How light we are becoming 19

So this is what it was like 21

Combers 22

On what is in the first place 24

Interference patterns

Out of the fabric of knowing 27

Interferometer 29

The time it takes shadows to fall 31

Mutagenic 32

Bent water light something 33

Hold the phone 34

On afterlives 35

Veiled through revelation 36

Water is the home of knives 37

At the edge 38

The architecture of falling 40

More misunderstandings 43

Sheets of rain 46

Somnolent dusk wheel 48

I'm talking to you tonight from radio nowhere 49

Fortune teller

A key in the shape of a kite 53

Dwelling 55

Expect bilocation 57

Knocking 59

No hesitation 61

Anahata nada 63

Entheogen 65

Phase conjugation mirror 67

Unfinishing 69

Present perfect

Sunyata or the reason we thought things were happening 73

Key of moonlight 75

Nightvision 76

In the oblivion world 78

Trance accumulation 79

Commemorative 81

Speechless 83

Raft 84

Ohm 86

On losing and finding 87

Catechism 89

What the deer know 91

What every stream knows 93

Photograph at evening looking west out to sea 94

Chromatic chatter 96

There is a way 98

The moment 100

Final report 102

Spectral data 103

Notes and acknowledgments 107

Editorial Reviews

This is a masterful collection of vivid, delicate and yes, wise poems, poems of tender awareness and continual and energizing arrival. A book of profound intelligence, compassion and joy.” The Fiddlehead


“unfinishing is an amazing exercise in attention. Henderson moves with palpable acuity through a metaphysical wrecking yard of time and dream, of images, memories, and sensations, not simply as themselves but as hieroglyphs of a spiritual address. The sunyata of these poems opens the rusted-out doors of perception to ask us what we thought we knew and what we can possibly know.” Fred Wah, author of Music at the Heart of Thinking"


“Henderson employs the languages of science and philosophy – Eastern and Western – to trace the mind’s engagement with a world composed of time, memory, mortality, and, ultimately, compassion and love. These are the qualities from which ‘the fabric of knowing’ and the fabric of these poems are woven.” Randy Lundy, author of Field Notes for the Self and Blackbird Song


“unfinishing is a work of caring intelligence and subtle craft. In Henderson’s hands the things of this world flare; they crash in spanking-new image and metaphor and open in exact rhythms of something more fleeting, more persistent. A shining that takes us by surprise and pleasure.” Dennis Cooley, author of Irene and Gibbous Moon


“unfinishing is an amazing exercise in attention. Henderson moves with palpable acuity through a metaphysical wrecking yard of time and dream, of images, memories, and sensations, not simply as themselves but as hieroglyphs of a spiritual address. The sunyata of these poems opens the rusted-out doors of perception to ask us what we thought we knew and what we can possibly know.” Fred Wah, author of Music at the Heart of Thinking

From the Publisher