I’ll Never Play the Hammered Dulcimer by Jan Hanson

There’s such tenderness in the poems of Jan Hanson, and such grace, so little bitterness or regret. The poems in I’ll Never Play the Hammered Dulcimer describe the whole arc of a woman’s life — a woman who might have played the hammered dulcimer, but instead became a poet, writing “secret messages” to herself. What otherwise might be “ordinary” — a rootless childhood, the joys and inevitable disappointments of romantic love, the going on from one generation to the next— is made extraordinary here by subtle craft, persistent music, and the beauty of deep remembering.
–Cecilia Woloch

This is a collection of courageous and powerful continuity, a collection which recounts the life of an unnamed speaker, through first love, disappointment in married life, the exigencies of single-motherhood, and finally – most remarkably, in the last poem, a voice from ‘The Other Side’. This is both a fierce and gentle whorl-stop tour in twenty-three poems; and yet what is so striking, memorable, and moving in this collection is its capacity to stop, look intricately, and breathe deeply. I found this an engaging, beautiful, and highly commendable book. Each reading will repay riches.
–Leanne O’Sullivan

Shining shards of relationships pierce this lyric memoir like embroidery needles. From a stinging sandstorm in the school playground (her imagined corpse found somewhere near the tetherball pole) to the iron-my-shirts proposal of her first husband, from thoughtless men in Tony Lama boots to the clicking heels that once confirmed her corporate identity, Hanson stabs into the pretty expectations of normal life. She recognizes that “if I’m smart I’ll hide my stuff so they can’t find it, / since I wouldn’t want them to really know me anyway.” But she dares to reveal herself fully here, in short honest pages from “the other side of life.” Despite “The red tool box he left when he left, in case / I ever needed a hammer,” Hanson needs no heavy tools. Her moth-gentle poems sliver memory into hard truths, heart-felt “secret messages to myself” delivered with a Proustian hint of licorice or a dry mouthful of old buried Cheerios. Hanson may never play a hammered dulcimer, but that’s clearly by choice. These finely-tuned poems confirm that she can play any instrument she wants.
–Lisa Pasold