Honeycomb: Poems

This book is a neglected masterpiece. Triquarterly Books, an imprint of Northwestern University, has produced a beautiful book to hold in the hand, so why then the failure to promote the best work to date by a poet working at the peak of her powers? Moreover, this book, these poems take us from the garden, the metaphorical world we think we inhabit, to the hive of the mind, wherein the mind is losing its language, the very words with which it speaks itself into being. Horror, love: how does one chronicle one's mother succumbing to dementia (how can one know the diagnosis of Alzheimer's until the post-mortem?), entering the world of loss where losing doesn't end, bearing "the weight of this sad time" (an epigraph from Lear) except through the language, the second gift from Mother to daughter, the language the mother no longer has? This book, and I don't think of it as a book of individual poems, but as a way of stations, momentary stops along a progress to "a little spray of soul" being dispersed upon "the grace of waves, of stars, remotest isles," this book can be read entire, as a whole, as one long aria to the mother, who she was, what she has become, what she will be, beyond farewell.