Watching Bees

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.