The poems in Derek Hendersons Songs are translations of a film cycle of the same name, shot by American filmmaker Stan Brakhage (19332003) to document his and his familys life in Colorado in the mid-1960s. Where Brakhages films provide a subjective visual record of his experience bewildered by the eye, these poems let language bewilder the space a reader enters through the ear. Henderson tenders the visual experience of Brakhages filmsfilms of the domestic and the wild, the private and political, the local and globalinto language that insists on the ultimate incapacity of languageor of imageto fully document the comfort and the violence of intimacy. Songs expresses the ecstasy we so often experience in the company of family, but it just as urgently attests to ecstasys turbulent threat to familys stability. Like Brakhages films, Hendersons poems carry across into language and find family in every moment, even the broken ones, all of them abounding in hope.