How Way Leads on to Way

There is a beauty and wisdom to Linda Dini Jenkins’ collection How Way Leads on to Way that is both breathtaking and disarming. Her poems cross countries, continents, and time. With a casual grace and carefully considered steps, she takes her readers along on her search for her rightful and spiritual home. Is she a gypsy carrying pieces of each place she has moved to, through, and from to the next place and then the next? Or leaving breadcrumbs, the smallest bits of herself, behind? Her words kept me moving with her, grateful to see people and places through her eyes, to see the everyday as extraordinary, and to see those people and things overlooked and unobserved by others as heroic. I want to meet the impish octogenarian of “Pineapple Weed” and to smell that plant gardeners yank out and toss away. In Linda’s deft hand, it becomes clear it—as all of us—deserves to be seen, understood, and loved. How Way Leads on to Way is a book to be cherished, read again, and again, and will hopefully help me to know whether where I landed in life is truly where I wanted to be.

From Memorial Drive in Cambridge to the Russian puppeteer in Harvard Square to the Cloisters and Coney Island and across the Atlantic to her beloved Abruzzo, Linda Dini Jenkins takes her readers to mysterious dreams that hurtle, race and enlighten in her latest chapbook, How Way Leads on to Way. When she encounters “… the artist who thinks the crows are taking over the world…” she sees past the wingspans that populate his canvasses to the heart of the matter: “the cacophony of conspiracy …” because she knows the way to her own gypsy heart that persuades her to leave home to find home time and again.

How Way Leads on to Way is an intriguing book of dreams, haunting music, and mystery in a stark world flecked with color. With a clarity of vision and precise language, Linda Dini Jenkins brings us wistfully to places where a weed smells of pineapple, a fence strung with keys seeks “memories to unlock,” and a child sings at the front of a train car passing dying olive groves as an emblem of hope. The title’s nod to Frost calls up memory as transformation and the intertwined nature of our shared history as, through its portrait of Cambridge as a “melting pot that never really melts,” of Chelsea’s sleeplessness and underground work trains, of Richmond’s light and Utah’s mountains, all set against the ever-present backdrop of Italy and Italian heritage, the vivid imagery and nostalgia of each poem focus on the ruin time can cause and the ways that we must sustain our humanity. How Way Leads on to Way feels rich and intricate, an immersive journey to place, past, emotion and loss. By the conclusion of this dazzling collection, Dini Jenkins reminds us, “Our tea has cooled, but we drink it still.”