Irene Blair Honeycutt
Mountains of the Moon
Charlotte Lit Press
Reviewer: Rebecca Patrascu
Poet and teacher Irene Blair Honeycutt introduces her fifth collection, Mountains of the Moon, by quoting Margaret Gibson’s suggestion that writing poetry is “an act of attention and receptivity.” It’s an apt description for the new book, which showcases close consideration of the natural world as well as deep attentiveness to memories, dreams, and the grief that can accompany them.
Mountains of the Moon is Honeycutt’s first publication since the COVID-19 pandemic, when isolation caused so many of us to consider the views outside our windows and in our neighborhoods. The book’s opening section emphasizes this localized focus; the poet’s gaze is drawn to a praying mantis on the patio, a willow tree’s shadow, an ant line, a glossy mushroom. “Song for the Hours” describes daily rounds in Honeycutt’s courtyard. The moon of the book’s title makes its entrance in the opening poem, “During the Time of No Moon,” with the poet instructing herself to remember, “times you ran to the vacant lot next door / and sent messages up kite strings to the moon.” “Heron” concludes:
plumage tight
a dark half-moon
waxing on his shoulder
before the wings’
unfolding
The moon features in metaphors and images throughout the book. In “Cold Long Night, 2020,” it is, “peering between the maple’s bare limbs— / a watchful eye / against the dark wall of sky.” In the penultimate piece, it represents the legacy of the poet’s mother: “You carry me—a waxing moon / at your back.”
Lyrical poems about nature abound in Mountains of the Moon, but the book is also notably elegiac. The title of the last section’s dramatic poem, “We Came to a Place that was Grieving and Gathered to Listen,” could describe the collection in general. In memoriam poems with evocative details about departed teachers, family, and friends lean into bereavement while avoiding sentimentality or regret. In an episode of the Charlotte Reader Podcast from 2020, Honeycutt referred to grief as “a way of tending the loss,” and here she tends multiple losses, particularly the deaths of her brothers, Ralph, Ronnie and Ray. “The House within a Mansion,” from the sixth section, provides a dream tour with Honeycutt’s family in which she remembers a back stoop: “Ralph and I sat on those steps,” she recalls. “Cracked coconut shells with Daddy’s hammer. Sometimes we nailed through the three coconut eyes and drank the sweet water.” Addressing a brother in “The Dead Don’t Miss Us” she writes,
Hard to believe you don’t miss me
opening a can of oysters and stirring them
till they wrinkled in a pot of steaming milk.
And how we crumbled saltines into the bowl,
drank the stew down to the flecks
of black pepper.
Honeycutt has said that if she had not been a teacher, she could have been a preacher, and her work reveals an impulse toward relationship-building that would benefit either calling. She dedicates more than a quarter of the poems in this collection to individuals, and the book itself is dedicated to her own instructors, among whom are Bill Holm, David Whyte, Mark Strand, Linda Pastan, and Miroslav Holub. In these dedications, as well as allusions, borrowed phrases and forms, and epigraphs, Honeycutt acknowledges connections with over a dozen poetic influences, from Wang Wei to Victoria Chang. The importance of relationship is also apparent through her frequent use of the second person. “You,” she writes again and again, addressing the dead and the living—people, animals, insects—as well as the titular “Moon” in the sixth section:
Though some have
called you corpse
you are alive to me
no matter how
ghostly you appear
early mornings
the sky gauzy
“Song for the Hours” makes use of the vocative “O” in an anaphoric address, with the poet speaking to subjects as varied as a rusting railroad spike, a train whistle, “mourning stars,” John Donne, and Typhoid Mary. The piece concludes with Honeycutt claiming, “O, wind chimes of my hours, / I am here.”
Irene Honeycutt’s place in the world, especially in the literary arena, is certainly well-established. During a long tenure at Central Piedmont Community College in Charlotte, North Carolina, she founded and directed a literary festival that brought acclaimed writers to the city year after year. She has received a Lifetime Achievement Award as well as a Legacy Award, and has had a Distinguished Lectureship established in her name. Yet despite her accomplishments and experience, Honeycutt eschews both showmanship and didacticism. Her voice is characterized by humility and a gentle decorum. Nothing is opaque, flashy, or clever just for the sake of cleverness. The poet is not so much showing off as she is showing up. She is open to what the world sends her way while also giving her grief the close attention it demands.
Many of the stories in Mountains of the Moon are relatable: poems about being distracted by email spam, or confronting a fifth-grade bully, or saying goodbye to a beloved dog. The playful “Talking to Siri in Pandemic Time” will resonate with anyone who has ever exchanged words with technology. Even those poems that are more uniquely personal, such as the story of Honeycutt’s mother defacing a birth certificate to ensure her five-year-old daughter’s enrollment in first grade, employ a conversational tone that invites us to share in her memories and gives us room to consider our own.
Through their demonstrations of attentiveness and devotion to fellowship, the poems in Mountains of the Moon model a means of tending our losses and tending to one another. These poems also illustrate how well Honeycutt understands poetry’s ability to capture a moment, its power to memorialize. As she writes in “When the Last Page Turns”:
Wherever I was when last
you read me
let the empty space
remember
