Michael Hettich
The Halo of Bees: New & Selected Poems 1990-2022
Press 53
Reviewer: Vivian Wagner
Michael Hettich’s The Halo of Bees is a remarkable collection of poems from several decades, and together they form a kind of tapestry with recurring themes, images, and motifs. Many of the poems explore nature and wilderness, often as a way to meditate on parenting, aging, and mortality, and all of them convey the poet’s abiding sense of wonder, curiosity, and compassion.
The collection is divided into twelve sections. The first, “The Shape of Moving,” includes poems Hettich says in the Acknowledgments were written in 2021 and 2022, and the other sections offer a selection of poems from an array of books and chapbooks published between 1990 and 2021.
This collection is often concerned with physical and emotional movement through time, through the world, and through a life. The idea that the action of moving can have a shape is itself a central paradox that underlies the entire book, as the poems grapple with what it means to move, change, evolve, age, and become something and someone new. The poem “The Shape of Moving,” in the section of the same name, explores this theme, with the woman the speaker loves declaring that “her life has been wasted,” right before looking out the window “to marvel at the blooming // flowers no one has planted.” It’s a moment of simultaneous despair and hope, when there’s nothing to do but sit by a lake and drink wine, before slowly walking back home through the darkness.
Similarly, in “The River,” the speaker and his wife confront the movement inherent in aging, with both of them taking on new identities: “We’ve agreed to try out our new selves and meet / back here in a few days.” While they’re in the process of evolving and changing—the speaker into “a stranger I’ve hardly imagined”—a river rises near their house, and they clean out closets, going through clothes and books and shoes in preparation, it seems, for a possible flood. The river, moving both downstream and up the banks, helps them to leave their old identities behind: “Even our faces in the mirror seem / to have been swept away now, by that rising river / and by our yearning.”
As is the case with many of the poems in this collection, the natural world both mirrors what’s happening in their human lives and helps keep them moving into an uncertain future.
That interaction between people and the natural world reappears throughout the collection in myriad ways. One fascinating trope found in several poems is that of a wilderness within. People might think they’re distinct beings, with their own particular trajectory and way of moving through the world, but in a number of these poems people realize that they actually contain universes. In “The Lesson,” for instance, a second grade teacher tells her class that “each of us carries an ocean inside / bigger than we are.” She then encourages her class to ponder that idea for a few moments, exploring the ocean within, swimming through the water and looking at the “many-colored fish.” She eventually claps her hands and brings them back to the classroom, where the students discover they are “happy to be sitting there,” in a moment at the edge of adulthood, “in the age of extinction and nuclear bombs / we hadn’t been taught about yet.” This is a small meditative moment in childhood, when the speaker explores his internal universe, and in so doing discovers a well of beauty and happiness that could sustain him through adulthood.
In a later poem, “First Day of Class,” the speaker’s the teacher this time, asking his students to describe what they might do with their lives after graduation. One student begins by saying he wants to start a forest, but that ambition evolves as he talks into wondering how many trees he’d have to grow “to become / a forest, a real one.” The other students follow his lead, with one of them saying “he wants to be a farm,” and another admitting that she “yearned to be a lake somewhere up north in the woods.” It’s a humorous moment in which traditional post-graduation plans instead take the form of imaging a life unconstrained by traditional notions of success. The poem ends with “And thus the room grows wild,” highlighting an uncanny slippage between conventional ideas of humanness and the mysterious workings of the natural world.
A number of these poems also explore the relationship between parents and children, with those identities serving as markers for understanding a life’s journey. In some of these poems, the poet’s the child, learning about the world from his own parents. In “Shade,” for instance, the speaker as a young boy watches his mother climbing a ladder to pick crabapples, until she “stepped off into the tree and seemed / to really disappear.” He climbs up to find her sitting in the tree, apples in her skirt, “crying softly,” in a moment of perplexing vulnerability that now, in his far-distant adulthood, he’s still trying to understand.
In other poems, like “The Parents,” the speaker is the parent. In this poem, he and his wife follow their eight-year-old daughter on the beach, marveling at her seeming independence and fearlessness, only to realize that all along she’d been crying, searching for them: “She’d been frantically looking for us / and the place we’d left our towels—she feared / we’d forgotten her, gone home without her.”
It’s a painful moment, when the parents are at a loss, having misinterpreted the situation and their daughter’s experience, even as “we’d been right there / the whole time.” The poem captures both deep parental love and the inability of parents to always protect their children from an imperfect and potentially traumatic world.
It’s impossible to describe all of the profoundly moving poems in a long and elaborate collection like this one, but suffice it to say that if you open the book at any point and read whatever poem presents itself, from whatever decade, you’ll find a moment of truth, beauty, and wonder—one that reverberates with all the poems that came before, and all the ones that follow. In the poem “The Halo of Bees,” the body is described as “the structure that holds / the world intact.” This collection does just that; it holds the overwhelming and sometimes catastrophic world together, from mothers in crabapple trees to children on beaches, gardens growing to rivers flooding, swimming across lakes to diving into internal oceans, birth to extinction, childhood to old age, life to death.
