Smoking Mirror

Bob Lincoln is Head of the Acquisitions Department at the University of
Manitoba Libraries.

These prose poems investigate the roots of an extinct culture—the
Aztec civilization—and its gods. Henderson’s approach blends
visionary and sensual images of the natural landscape and the
extraordinary beliefs of the spirit. He also allows enough human context
to make the poems believable and relevant to ordinary human desires.

These poems appear as fragments of a larger reality. They are like a
threshold to a new worldview. The poems are like dreams on a tablecloth,
in a Mexico of the imagination. Henderson writes of the reality beneath
the surface of contemporary Mexico. Time, distance, and history collapse
and reform in a continual cycle. The poet embraces Coyolxuaqui, the
goddess of silver fire; at other times the poet thinks of himself as a
fish in a smoking mirror.

The land that is described is not the land that a tourist encounters:
“Here stone breathes, shines like phosphor in street of currents,
roots and clouds.” This is a dream book, with images that tear at the
sensibilities, at the “mother-of-pearl heartbeat.”

Henderson is inventing the future: it is a place of contradiction and
paradox, of light and dark, with bipolar forces at war. These poems are
like indecipherable inscriptions and drawings that suddenly yield an
illuminating message, as in “Ghost Writer.” The poems give a sense
that extraordinary things are about to happen. When the poet encounters
love, he says, “I must hazard what I love most deeply,” and he
writes in “a language that turns itself in time.”

There is no escape from the past, present, or future. Nothing is
certain. Smoking Mirror is a voyage of magic with the Night Sun and the
jaguar. The reader is the watcher and listener.