The Yale Journal for Humanities in Medicine    

Book Review

Bridge and Tunnel
By John Hennessy.
Turning Point Press, 2007. 85 pp. $17.00.
Reviewed by Laurie Rosenblatt, M.D. (Laurie_rosenblatt@dfci.harvard.edu).

“That might have been me, the boy you saw/walking below the smokestacks. All night/he crossed the bridges between boroughs,/hitch-hiked rides beneath the rivers…” John Hennessy writes in the poem, “Signing the Kills” (15). The poem concludes:
                        He baited pigeons and seagulls to play
                        Saint Francis and he would have tagged them
                        too if they’d come. He walked until morning
                        smoke clouded the starts above the Kills
                        and doused the distant city’s lights.
                        He tossed the rattling empty spray-can
                        And walked until he couldn’t be distracted.
                        He walked until that voice was finally quiet.
                        He walked until those slow clouds started
                        to billow like offerings at matins and he
                        was emissary of a generous silence.

In this first book, Bridge and Tunnel, Hennessy’s rich language—look at the skilled and effective repetition, “and walked," “He walked,” “He walked”—takes us through the industrial landscape of New Jersey with humor, heart, and a sharp eye.  He introduces us to the neighborhood and to the local characters, “Mike Devlin” “Pan in Arkansas.”  Here is “Dr. Swann” (27):
                        The gurneys skirt across the room like unmoored
                        lily pads.  Shoulders stooped, neck crooked
                        to better see beneath the ruptured skin, he snips,
                        cuts, saws, picks flattened slugs from ribs and liver,
                        sews cover over palpitating heart, lungs
                        stripped clean of shot.  Blood bags hang and drip,
                        deltas within the draining deltas he’s learned
                        his practice down, returned from Mekong to canals
                        and bridges quilting Newark, the skirmishes
                        along the borders, Arthur Kill to Sandy Hook;
                        he reminds himself that surgery is blind.
                        Mornings he backs across the Oranges
                        by commuter rail, his wake and oil slick,
                        while shades revive and cross before him, screened
                        by light reflecting off the barges, thick as smoke.
                        Those left behind still haunt him, but no more
                        than some who live, their scars his signature.

 We also meet bullies and abusers for instance in, “How the Dog-Star Got His Name” (71):

                        Some said he was born beneath the hottest star,
                        but don’t believe it—his mother dropped him howling,
                        his foal-legs hobbled, cleft palate whistling up
                        January’s goat, the star-climber Capricorn.

                        Or else it was the way he bent us boys
                        and girls over cinder-block stacks, the arms
                        of his uncle’s easy-chair down the moldy basement.
                        And later they said he played bitch in prison,…

Hennessey never strays into bathos or hysteria.  As a way of appreciating his work, let’s spend a minute on this poem.  Note the even tone, the matter-of-fact voice as the poem balances a mix of pity, rage, confused victimization, and revenge.  Here Hennessy uses every word to work out the complex truths he finds in the experience.  Skipping ahead two stanzas we arrive at:

                        the star tattoo he carved himself, six-pointed
                        collar around a black-eyed dog, which came
                        near killing him with tetanus.  He was no
                        dog-bite survivor, star-baiting rock or mensch,

                        just victim of an unsteady hand, his spray-can.
                        The morning my buddy Paul caught him tagging
                        the walls at Saint Mary’s, a simple asterisk,
                        stick-figure pig, was all the mural he could make.

                        Paul served at mass without a word; that night
                        we fixed his sketch with half my gear, whole cans
                        of Apollonian Gold, transformed his pig
                        with heavy-lidded sun, a canine snout.

Every detail carries weight.  To take a single example, “Apollonian Gold” gestures to the intellect and to education, to the light of rationality and the law.  It is the name of the paint that covers as it reveals and transforms Freddy’s victims into his superiors with their ability to “beautify” (with its religious overtones) his “stick-figure pig.”

                        The face was Freddy’s, beautified.  Dog-Star,
                        I signed it.  I gave him his name.  They said
                        The little kids looked up to him, called him
                        the night-time sun, the summer-star, but how

                        we hated him.  It took all six altar boys
                        with steel-wool brushes, buckets of turpentine,
                        a hose snaking across the parking lot
                        from the rectory garden, to scrub him away.

The over-painting becomes an act of mastery that evolves into a naming with all the attendant implications of ownership, domination, and control. The poem acknowledges the abuser’s vulnerability by including details like his poorly repaired hair-lip, his clumsiness with the spray can, and the infected tattoo. And yet Hennessey’s poem doesn’t let Freddy off the hook.  It extracts revenge by telling, and faces the ultimate (im)possibility of scrubbing Freddy away even as his actions, and the story, are preserved on the page.

Bridge and Tunnel itself builds poem on poem, recreating, remembering a world.  The poems, thus, interact with each other in a way that cannot be captured fully except by reading the entire book. And since the poems in Bridge and Tunnel are accessible, wise, interesting, and original, you’ll want to.

Published: March 16, 2008