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Reviewed by Jamie Michele for Readers' Favorite
Dan Flanigan’s Tenebrae is a collection of original poetry that examines a marriage carried into widowhood through memory and confession. Among them, in the poem Quills, quoted speech and recurring porcupine imagery show spouses mistaking self-protection for devotion until sobriety alters their life together. Certain Proceedings in the Tribunals of a Vanity Called Hope uses courtroom allegory with black comedy to recast cancer treatment as repeated appeals against death. Verse returns in Strepitus: Like a Fallen Empire, where imperial ruin beside a coastline becomes an image of bodily survival after purpose has vanished, with late rhyme marking the courage shared by the couple. The prose in The Agnostic’s Daughter returns to the class shame that fed the husband’s alcoholism, as he accepts responsibility while considering whether forgiveness can be possible after his wife’s death.
Dan Flanigan’s Tenebrae is a beautiful collection whose language gives every poem a truly enduring grace and power. Most poems use free verse, yet Flanigan is still somehow able to give the form a musical quality. Others read like essays, more prose than poetry, and still his shifts in cadence make each piece distinctive within the collection’s intimate voice. My favorite poem, That Sunday Morning, is excellent because it follows a sixteen-year-old boy watching Sara and Renée leave St. Paul’s, then shows how that moment becomes lifelong guilt over Sara’s fate through biblical allusion. My other favorite is a narrative poem, 72nd & Amsterdam, and I love how one Manhattan corner becomes the exact point where forty-five years of marriage meet medical uncertainty, giving the husband’s return to that place a measured emotional and moral charge. Readers drawn to autobiographical poetry shaped by love and loss will adore this.
