On Vitality, on Tenderness: A Review of Michael Hettich’s The Halo of Bees – Terrain.org

The Halo of Bees: New & Selected Poems 1990-2022
By Michael Hettich
Press 53 | 2023 | 256 pages

 
Over 200 pages deep and spanning 32 years, Michael Hettich’s The Halo of Bees: New & Selected Poems 1990-2022 is a moving portrait of domestic life and the natural world. The world as Hettich sees it is lush and full of vitality, with “houses that are knee deep in flowers,” and jasmine “flowering with so many bees / I thought for a moment some motor was caught / in its branches.” Lakes, insects, alligators, and birds all populate this selection of poems from Hettich’s impressive body of work, and the majesty of Earth is on display on every page. Paired with these images are Hettich’s observations about ordinary parts of life—parenthood, marriage, aging, friendships. Together these reflections on the natural and human worlds form a holistic and heartfelt reminder to be present and attentive to one’s own life and to the planet we call home.

The Halo of Bees features work from 20 of Hettich’s books and chapbooks, alongside a selection of new poems. The selections are not quite arranged in chronological order, notably with one section dedicated to prose poems that were published 18 years apart. But it is, for the most part, a sequential journey through the speaker’s life, composed of quotidian moments. Things are changing in the background, of course—the speaker and his partner get married, have children, move across the country—but the naming of these milestone events rarely enter the poems. The undercurrent remains constant over the years: the celebration of a full and embodied love that extends outward from the speaker, lavished on the people, plants, and creatures around him.

The phrase that comes to mind describing Michael Hettich’s work is tender-hearted. Love and nostalgia flourish throughout The Halo of Bees; it is rare for any poem to not mention the speaker’s children, or present a snapshot from his beautiful relationship with his wife, a connective moment with nature, or a treasured memory of childhood years. In “Loons,” for instance, the speaker recollects an evening spent with his father in the woods of Maine, swimming and listening to the haunting call of the loons:

… my father started talking, hesitantly
at first, about loons—their mournful songs,
how rare they’d become, how rarely they allowed
humans to see them. He told me other things
I wish I could remember…

The tone is contemplative, wistfully capturing a long-ago time and a treasured memory with the speaker’s father. When the speaker and his father return home, the speaker lies awake at night listening to the loons calling, trying “to understand / what they might mean as they sang across the water / and who I might be in the dark.” Hettich renders this childhood memory with precision, encapsulating all the uncertainty and wonder of being a child who is learning about the world and determining who he will grow to be.

Other reflective poems highlight the speaker’s relationship to his wife and children. Poems such as “An Ordinary Morning” zero in on small moments of life together: in this case, the speaker’s breathless encounter with a herd of deer in the backyard that “seem to be / floating up into the bare trees.” The speaker wishes his wife were there to witness the deer, too, and the intimacy of their relationship is so evident in the poem, as the speaker longs for the person he loves to share in a powerful moment with him. In “Housekeeping,” the speaker and his spouse “sing softly across their [children’s] dreaming bodies / of happiness we haven’t ever really known / but want to make possible for them…” The same care that moves through poems about the speaker’s childhood echoes the speaker as they watch over their children. A final example of the speaker’s deep devotion and care for his family comes through in the poem “Fruit Trees and Flowers,” which is dedicated to Hettich’s son Matthew.

That May night, almost midnight, when the doctor caught him,
my son looked at first like a seal-child, head pointed,
dark-furred and sleek, not yet fully human.

I panicked for a moment; then I took my first breath
as a father, and I saw him there, and I knew him. When he nursed,

The room filled with his light—
                  And though I tried stubbornly
                  not to let the nurses
                  carry him away,
To prick and measure his perfect, perfectly
innocent body, they took him anyway.

I’ve planted fruit trees and flowers in my yard,
key lime and gardenia, hibiscus and muscadine.

They will offer flowers, fragrances and fruits
when their season comes, regardless
of how well I care for them
or anything I do.

Readers are ferried through the many feelings that hit the speaker at once on holding his son for the first time: joy, fear, recognition, separation anxiety, acceptance, and love. And after these myriad emotions—likely connected many years later—the images of the speaker’s garden strengthen the poem’s end, with confident inference that just like a gardener, a parent nurtures what is already there, because the child carries everything inside needed to bloom.

Hettich’s ability to render such candid, open-hearted love and trust is one of his greatest strengths as a poet. Many writers fear being dismissed as sentimental, but Hettich leans into sentiment, celebrating companionship, growth, sensuality, and care, and inviting readers to access the emotional center of his work.

There are half a dozen or more poems about swimming naked in various bodies of water, both as a child and as an adult. It seems a bit curious, at first, to repeatedly reference skinny dipping, but the repetition of this theme points towards the speaker’s insistence on spontaneity and pleasure, on openness to the world despite the risks involved. It becomes a common practice for the speaker to find a secluded body of water and jump in naked, just because he wants to. One memorable poem recalls the year the speaker and his partner swam regularly in the Everglades, reveling in the “sweet warmth” of the water. The speaker remembers,

For that whole first year, we had no idea
those croaks we found so charming were actually
challenges from bull alligators establishing their territory,
calling anything in the immediate vicinity
to make love or fight, and they were hungry, too.
We just swam out, naked and happy.

Here the practice of skinny dipping unwittingly moves from vulnerable to downright dangerous, but the point still stands. Important pieces of the story are purposefully excluded from the poem—the shock of learning they’d been swimming in alligator-infested waters, the decision to never swim there again—because the focus is on the speaker and his partner’s joy and their ability to be present in their environment.

Tempering the serious or reserved tone of many of the poems, Hettich also infuses metaphor, conversationality, play, and fabulist aspects into his poems, making some pieces reminiscent of Russell Edson’s work. One such excerpt is from “Behind Our Memories”:

When doctors cut open this old man to fix his heart,
they found a tree, just behind the breast bone…

And when they dug deeper, they found not just
the one tree, but a whole forest full of flowers,
rivers and animals they’d believed extremely rare.
even extinct.

This imaginative scene is a perfect example of Hettich’s ability to talk about humanity through natural images. It toes the line between the magical and the ordinary, reminding readers to cultivate their interior life, and to remember how their lives can impact other people.

In Hettich’s title, The Halo of Bees, the bees are analogous to the poet’s life, symbolizing vitality,  a family-oriented lifestyle, love of flowers, and a wide-ranging pollination of delight. There is an ease and tenderness to the poems, a nuanced magnetism that becomes complex as it quietly draws the reader in. So much of contemporary poetry centers on difficult topics—grief, politics, past hurts—important topics that surface in Hettich’s work, too, but it’s refreshing to read this collection, which embraces ease and contentment. Hettich’s poems are a good reminder that life is lived mostly through ordinary moments, and these moments hold powerful observations and lessons. To read The Halo of Bees is to take a break from the hectic clamor of modern life, to step away and consider how life can be sweet and joyous and undemanding when we slow down and take a breath, or a swim.
 

Read poetry by Michael Hettich appearing in Terrain.org: two poems, two poems, Letter to America poem, two poems, and one poem.

Genevieve Hartman is a Korean-American writer based in Rochester, New York. She is the publicist for Alice James Books, social media and outreach coordinator for Adi Magazine, and an art editor for Gasher Journal. Her poems and reviews have been published in The Rumpus, Stone Canoe, Rain Taxi Review, Singapore Unbound, River Mouth Review, and others. Follow her on Instagram at @gena_hartman and on X at @gena_hartman1, or connect at genahartman.com.

Header photo of Everglades by Oliver Zühlke, courtesy Pixabay.