Gift of Screws

Kim Fahner is the author of You Must Imagine the Cold Here.

Robin Hannah’s first full-length collection is a brilliantly crafted
book. The winner of the New Muse Award for 1996, this multifaceted
collection speaks to the sheer depth of love and loss and to the richly
harsh reality of life. Hannah seems to say in her poetry that we must
see the realistically nasty bits of life in order to better appreciate
its brilliance and beauty.

Poems about writing are common in poetic circles. Hannah is hardly
immune to this inward examination of self and poem, but the result is a
series of sharp poems that aptly reflect a poet’s desire to obey the
muse. Hannah speaks of the insatiable need to write when she says,
“where on earth am I from / and which cardboard box / has my pen.”
These few lines encapsulate the sum total of any poet’s life
experience—trying to figure out the meaning behind life events and
then finding some way of writing it all down. “The Drought of ’91”
describes what it’s like to go through a dry spell—an experience in
which the process of writing becomes a painful obsession with the lack
of “muse-ical” inspiration.

Most memorable are those pieces that express the struggle to survive.
In a series of bittersweet poems about love and the ravages of cancer,
Hannah evokes a darker side into which the remnants of rose petals are
sublimely scattered. This is a poet with great promise and scope of
soul.