The Lightning Tree
Rebecca Hendry
These poems are detailed survival instructions for those who grieve, those walking the earth “no longer whole” when the universe has “cracked apart”.
—Mary Ann Moore and Ursula Vaira, Raven Chapbooks judges 2024
Like the image of the tree struck by lightning on Rebecca Hendry’s chapbook cover, her life is shattered by the sudden death of her children’s father by accidental drug poisoning in August 2020. The poems unfold in powerful expressions of her bewilderment and grief at the loss of Garrett as memories of their life together surface then subside while his presence looms large. In a ritual of closure recounted in the last poem, Rebecca takes his ashes to the lightning tree at the wetlands at Sergeant’s Bay where she lets them go “in the rich silt of the marsh bed / in the waterlilies / fed by the minerals of his bones.”
—Lorraine Gane, author of If I Have Known Beauty
Grief makes it difficult to speak of the pain, the immense loneliness that echoes through the emptiness when the beautiful contradiction that is the father of your children dies. Rebecca Hendry carries her love that has nowhere left to go, in poems full of grace that break open the heart again, in the silence that lives on, after the poem’s last word.
—Susan Musgrave, author of Exculpatory Lilies
Rebecca Hendry has published two novels, One Good Thing (Touchwood Editions, 2018) and Grace River (Brindle and Glass, 2009), and her short fiction has appeared in the Dalhousie Review, Wascana Review, Event, Windsor Review, Room, and other literary journals. She has been a book editor for over twenty years, working for Canadian publishing houses as well as self-publishing companies and private clients. She lives in Gibsons, BC.
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ISBN: 978-1-7781603-9-4 | POETRY | $20.00 + shipping
