Clara’s Bees by Catherine Savage Brosman

Clara’s Bees by Catherine Savage Brosman
Little Gidding Press, 2021, 58 pages

After days spent in digital ether, there’s an especial joy in opening a new book: the texture of fresh, smooth pages, the contours of black serif inked on a cream canvas. With such pleasure one heralds the publication of Clara’s Bees, Catharine Savage Brosman’s thirteenth poetry collection, an elegantly designed volume from Little Gidding Press, whose mission is to “publish books of poetry and fiction that cast light into the darkness and illuminate the mysteries of reality.” Little Gidding has published other noteworthy contemporary poets in the anthologies The Slumbering Host (2022) and An Outcast Age, as well as collections by Dan Rattelle (The Commonwealth, 2022) and Joshua Hren (Last Things, First Things, and Other Lost Causes, 2022).

A scholar of French literary history and professor emerita at Tulane University, Brosman is known for her precise, detailed descriptions of place in her poems, and this volume includes verse vignettes set in Colorado—“By Fountain Creek,” “Looking at Pike’s Peak”—and World War Two—“Compiégne,” “Normandy 7, August 1944,” “Phoebe, 1944”—as well as of natural scenes—“Blue Heron by the Pond,” “Chrysanthemums,” “Tulips in a Vase,” “Aglaonema”—and scenes and portraits of people amidst—“Clara’s Bees,” “Old Mr. Chauvin,” “Heart.” The final section of the collection comprises ekphrastic poems based on illuminations from the prayer book The Hours of Catherine of Cleves, a sumptuous manuscript from around 1440 (housed at the Morgan Library and Museum in New York). Most of her poems are written in abab rhyming quatrains.

A recurring theme in Brosman’s work, and in this latest collection in particular, is the tension between the “objective” natural world—the blue heron unaware and untouched by human “moods, emotions, motives”—and our human world of “love, regret, and hurt.” How does the natural world signify, and how can we see truly into layers of creation so hidden from us?

In “Blue Heron by the Pond,” the heron peers into the water, utterly without need for or interest in his human spectator, “his attention occupied / by possibilities I cannot see / below, he rules the grassy berm…” The line break at “see” delightfully ties together the hidden (from us humans) thoughts that occupy the heron’s mind and the ways in which he commands this bank.

His stillness interrupts the human day,
its moods, emotions, motives, what will come,
or came before, and all that flows away.

The speaker is stilled by his stillness, which “interrupts the human day” and its worries over “what will come, / or came before.” The next clause, “and all that flows away,” brilliantly suggests both that these worries include things that “flow away” as well as that the worries over “moods, emotions, motives” are themselves things that “flow away,” like the rippling of the pond water at the heron’s feet.

  Suddenly, the spear
has struck; his gullet twists, until the small
commotion ends.  An image, now austere
again, endures; no further sign at all.

His day will pass thus, standing, stalking, brain
and eye on duty constantly, alert
yet unreflecting, destined to remain
objective, while we love, regret, and hurt.

Even if there is no direct relationship between heron and human—after he spears his supper, he returns his “austere” stance, “alert / yet unreflecting, destined to remain / objective”—there is something to learn from his stillness, if only attention (and what is deep attention but love?).

In “Clara’s Bees,” the “modern” ballet of bee-lines and venturesome bees hunting pollen “in all directions, / to their purpose” elicits the speaker to compare these seemingly erratic apian expeditions to beekeeper Clara’s own ventures into life, “to be, and to be one’s possibilities—the muscles flexing / toward the goal, the pulse of datum turning toward idea.”

In “Aglaonema,” as she tends to her Chinese evergreen, the speaker muses on plants’ peculiar sentience: After all, “if a heavy-metal band / makes rubber trees recoil,” then perhaps plants may truly “appreciate affection, care / responding to a touch.” And perhaps too we may read “messages among the stars,” for after such wonders as “men on the moon,” and cells “seen by an electron microscope,” the speaker surmises, “nothing’s so strange that we cannot have hope.”

There is hope, too, even if only “spasms”—“the anxious kind, / a truce with fear”—in “Phoebe, 1944,” in which the wife waits for her husband’s return from the war. The worst happens, and Jack’s ship goes up in flames after an attack. Phoebe tries to suffer with him, to imagine what he went through, and at least achieves one convergence: as his ship went down into the waters, so she weeps for his passage on “the sea of no return.” The speaker leaves the reader with the unsettling question: “What does such burnt oblation signify?”

And yet, the poet trusts that this world—herons, tulips, bees, but also the matter and form of our lives—do signify. Just as the words of a poem mean, so does the created world, and every creature in it. There is purpose, even if the full glory of creation is only completely enjoyed by its Creator. Still the poet, the maker, participates in that enjoyment, and invites her readers therein.

Brosman’s final section on the Master of Catherine of Cleves’ illuminations continues a sequence begun in A Memory of Manaus (Mercer University Press, 2017). These poems consider portraits of St. George and St. Lucy, St. John the Baptist and St. Anthony the Great, as well as lesser-known saints like St. Gertrude and St. Alexis. Some of the collection’s loveliest moments come from this sequence, but also some of its duller lines. For example, the first stanza of “Saint Alexis” gives us the humdrum detail that “A colored background (the design / in white) completes the scene” of rose-caped St. Alexis and his ladder. Sometimes the perceptive care with which she describes objects and scenes and persons is more technically correct than transcendently musical, and one wishes that Brosman more often led her reader into the realm of astonishment.

The final stanza of “Saint Alexis,” however, sings in describing the material of his home and the deeper layer of his true home:

a ladder, alcove, bed. He would remain
there nearly twenty years, a saintly space,
for no one. But beneath the counterpane
of scarlet beat humility and grace.

There are also some memorable, though not soul-wrenching, lines: the opening of “Saint Lucy,” for example: “She is already what she will become.” Some lines are evocative, but their possibilities under-explored, such as the first line of “Saint John the Baptist”: “This is the wilderness of fasting…” Too quickly the poem moves to other images and ideas.

The final poem concerns “Christ at Emmaus,” and its last lines beautifully image the interpenetration of our time and eternity, of sign and signified:

A farewell phrase
from Matthew, nunc et semper, runs below;
Luke’s words, above, recount the scene for us.
His halo shines, conflating the tableau
of human time with God’s own, glorious.

Brosman’s poetry is precise, intelligent, and compassionate, and her new collection contains quiet wonders worthy of contemplation.