Whose Cries Are Not Music

In Benninghoff's Whose Cries Are Not Music she asks "Don't we in dying reveal who we are?" With a steadily dealt hand, somewhere east, in a "tinseled diner" she reveals fortune's deck of splintered seasons; the stray surprise: deer's blank eyes, a summer gull's pierced solitude. These poems "shine brightly. They take the stars away." Maureen Alsop Linda Bennninghoff is scrupulously attentive to the underpinnings of living one's life, whether she's watching gulls filling the empty sky like numberless dreams ("Gulls") or capturing the isolation and tenuous connections of relationships, to absorb the many facets of the human condition and give it back to the world with lyric precision. Her work runs wide and deep. Barbara Southard