Watching Bees, the author's fourth collection, brings together thirty mostly short poems, many previously published in (e.g.) Scientific American, some already anthologized. Speaking in voices that move easily between different forms, these poems inhabit lives ranging from Noah's wife reluctantly boarding the Ark, through Trojan warriors on the eve of defeat or survivors of the Black Death or Stalin's Terror, to sharp-edged current political comment. Beneath them simmer resonant tensions between family members - and between past and present, memory and personal responsibility, despair and hope. As the speaker notes in "Kitchen Talk, "The recipes I'm bequeathed are meals / for fishes, splattered by spoons and sauces, / stained with secrets." That blend of ironic detachment and feeling is the beating heart of this book.
Intelligence and musicality entwine in 34 short poems that leave the reader "braced with stunned relief" -- a grand round trip through history, music and art which brings us back each time to more of what we didn't know we needed, until we find it here.
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