A friend recently handed me a copy of Bridge and Tunnel by John Hennessy, whom he knew growing up in Rahway, NJ. A wonderful collection—though I’m sure that part of my enjoyment and appreciation came from revisiting some of the sites and sounds (and smells) of my boyhood home. The Merck factory, of course, the trains and neon, the rivers and gutters blooming trash (the ubiquity of iniquity?), the juxtaposition of cattails and oil slicks, the state pen (where I worked one summer)–they’re all here. The language, rhythm, and imagery, often jarring and disjointed, are intense and palpable, and Hennessy is clearly present in the moment when he reaches back into his formative past.

The book title is of course appropriate and evocative. The Rahway area is not far from New York, accessible from New Jersey only by bridge and tunnel. And even if NYC is not often mentioned directly, its specter haunts every poem, representing, as it does, the gateway to something bigger and better, beginnings and limitless vistas (at least from the perspective of a boy in urban/suburban New Jersey). But if New York is the promised land, the otherworld, a state of grace, the bridge and tunnel represent two ways of getting there, two world views and life circumstances. The bridge rises over and above, removed from the grit and desolation below. The tunnel requires a literal and metaphorical descent into the underworld, the base and worm-ridden bowels of the human psyche. The bridge and tunnel suggest an achievable heaven and hell—but while the bridge is always an option, most characters in this book choose the tunnel.

Both structures link two separate but nonexclusive places or states—and here again, the symbolism runs deep. Hennessy apparently grew up in the Irish catholic tradition, and the attendant symbols and references are plentiful. But this tradition (at least in my experience) focuses less on the desire to achieve a state of grace than on the need to repress basic human desires and emotions. Hennessy pairs that upbringing with the classical tradition, the Greek and Roman myths—though not surprisingly, he tends to focus on the myths that deal in some way with the underworld, a gestalt that admixes original sin and the baser elements of our nature. Persephone, the Minotaur, Orpheus, Polyphemus, and even Pan rub shoulders with Satan himself.

Hennessy’s Rahway is not just a figurative place, but a physical space with real inhabitants. Many of these are Hennessy’s boyhood cronies, but some are the neighborhood denizens, invariably damaged and cast off in some way. Of these, the most haunting is a character known as Dog-Star Freddy, an apparent sex offender or pedophile. He appears directly in at least four poems, emerging from his basement (underworld) only long enough to torment birds and lure away delinquent youths. Which brings up another salient feature of this book: it’s not just a collection, its a cohesive whole, and owes a debt to Masters’ Spoon River Anthology. Many of the characters glimpsed in early poems return in later poems, often gaining depth and complexity in the interim. So the altarboy of one poem, Paul (whom I knew personally—the brother of the friend who handed me the book) is also seen delivering newspapers and ultimately retreating to a Buddhist monastery in South Korea. When the love/sex interest of an early poem (named Ball—and if that’s her real name, what a wonderful coincidence) returns in the final poem, we learn that his affections for her were much deeper and more complicated than the earlier poem would suggest. Taken collectively, then, the poems suggest a mind that is obsessed and fixated with the past as object, a puzzle that must be solved or a trauma that must be confronted before the poet can move on.

If I have any gripe about the book, it’s that it seems to be written for a small circle of friends, or readers with insider knowledge. But then again, I have to include myself in that group. Hennessy and I had friends in common, and I’d guess he remembers as well as I do the smell of burnt coffee in a certain house on Seminary Ave. I’ve lately been parsing through my memories, wondering whether we had met years ago. A moot point, I suppose: after reading Bridge and Tunnel, I get a sense that I know him.