Déjà Vu

Laura Hansen's poems are familiar to me in the intimate, hushed way that a walk through the pine forest of my childhood is familiar, the way that the soap and warm water and sponge of dishwashing is familiar, the way that the scent of a lover's t-shirt is familiar. Writing through the prism of middle age, ordinary experiences and observations--herons by a lake, a storm at night, a visit to a fast food restaurant--become, in Hansen's beautifully observant words, extraordinary, fragile, things to be cherished even as they turn, in the moment, to memory. While many of the poems in Deja Vu are solitary poems, written from a deeply reflective place, Hansen, like Mary Oliver, has a rare ability to create human connection through the solitude of nature. Poem by poem, she opens her fierce and tender heart to the reader. Déjà Vu is a lovely book.

--Alison McGhee

Laura Hansen's wonderful new collection, Déjà Vu, covers a lot of territory for a chapbook, from honeybees and hummingbirds to forest fires in Canada and cold-blooded murders in her home town. These are generous and mature poems, honest assessments of relationships with one's self and others. Laura isn't afraid of the dark, but she never leaves us out there alone: "We shared a cup of sky before bed," she says, and "paddled our way halfway to the moon."

--Joyce Sutphen

From the title poem noting illumination in the dark sky which are not fireflies or stars but plane lights; we are kindred spirits to Laura Hansen's idea of déjà vu. We understand her feelings, recognize we have thought the same. She unravels many stories that take place near or in the river, stories of love, both of her home place and the creatures she encounters. It is a telling of lost personal loves. It is the story of listening to birds, tasting blackberries, understanding bees. She sings to us about the body, how it changes, how it responds to gifts of river rocks; blue pills and being alone. Her words are the magic she willingly shares: oak tree shards remaining after lightning hit, chilling tale of a man taking care of teenage intruders, the acknowledgement of the mystery of death and the beginnings of a next life. This collection should be cherished and read again and again.

--Susan Stevens Chambers

I have been sipping this collection of poems, slowly, so as to taste them. I love the quiet of some, the turbulence of others, the shimmer they exude, but feel inadequate to speak fluently to and about such work save that it satisfies my appetite for beauty.

--Beryl Singleton Bissell

"I could be all day praising this fine [] volume." ... "Déjà Vu contains poems of a quiet life, which is not to say nothing happens in them. These poems are full of careful observation, of the beauties and terrors of nature and human life. They also contain lost love, the perils and consolations of memory, the process of aging, some splendid Midwestern thunderstorms, and at least one murder. They bring the reader inside the intense mind-world of those to whom "the sacred comes to us/in our solitude, in the brush of tree bark/under our hands, in the soft way the sun/cups the star-studded Potentilla/in the fast food parking lot. /Yes. Even there."

--Edith Rylander