HONEYCOMB, poems by Carol Frost

I have made it through the Sealey Challenge, through 32 total books and out the other side of August (34 if you count Ravenna Press’s Triple as 3 chapbooks). I posted a photograph on Instagram of each cover with the day’s number, with the exception of this book. (For day 13, I posted another cover a second time.)

Let us admit that I got a bit lost at times. What book did I read yesterday? What book am I reading today? But, as these things go, each day brought stand-out poems, and — by the end — certain books loomed. Not necessarily that they were better or worse than others, but their impact on me, at the particular time (and mood) I found myself in, created a greater impact.

A literature professor once said to me, and to her class of graduate students. “I know it’s a lot of reading, but when the wave recedes I hope you’ll be able to tell what flecks of foam have stuck to you and left the greatest impression.” That’s how it feels this morning.

So.

Carol Frost’s Honeycomb (TriQuarterly Books, 2010) was one of those impactful books. The poems in this, her ninth collection, address her mother’s struggle with Alzheimer’s disease, a journey I’ve also undergone. It’s hard not to quote the description on the cover, because it’s true: she writes “with unflinching sincerity and courage.”

Her mother’s memory loss is only one theme. The other, woven throughout every poem, is the decline in the bee population. Flying insects of all kinds are growing endangered, and the loss of our native pollinators is a disaster that really can’t be countenanced or compensated.

As is the loss of one’s mother. The poems are a perfect marriage of spirit and humanity and nature.

In these 34 poems (33 in a row, and then an “afterword”), a mother drinks ‘from the poppy-cup / and drowses in her world of dream” (“(For the ones”). A daughter listens “from her shell of silence…” and the last notes are “a song or wound,” or both. In “(Tyrannus tyrannous)”:

bee after bee disappear[s]

into incandescence::

Only the metaphysic flower

feels the approach: and emptying.

(I’m sorry not to be better informed about what’s going on with the double-spaced lines, parentheses, and double colons — I seem to remember encountering double colons before, but I don’t want to research it just now. I will say that, whatever those marks mean, Frost gets away with them. I was willing to grant these poems every grace.)

Consider this short poem about halfway through the book:

To live without memory is to have each hour

as a pane of air for canvas and the view from a window

to paint: amber-honey cold mornings:

humbled by evening: variation and variation

of ambiguous figments — ziggurat beehive

auroras — flicker and go out. All history

may as well be in these brushstrokes:

the hand has not rested nor the paint dried.

— Carol Frost

The book, in short, is itself incandescent, and it is one I will be reading again, and again.

To learn more about the poet, you might start here: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/carol-frost.