Blind Huber: Poems

okay... I discovered Nick in an anthology of "dangerous" young poets, even though some of these poets were in their 40's...(is that young, in comparison?) Anyway. I ordered this book immediately. It is a whole book...as opposed to poetry collections that are just that...collected poems. The book is loosely based on the pioneer beekeeper (who went blind). I love bees and so was already biased toward the poems. However, Nick shows such a tenderness to small details, he enters the bees world as often as Huber's, and speaks with authority as both. Drawing on this quiet art as inspiration, as well as the blind man who provided the rest of the beekeeping world with most of the knowledge they now have, Nick crafts poems that are disturbing, soft, and sometimes statements of fact dressed up in fancy garb. My favorite image from one of the poems has the bees filling up the walls of a house with honey. The owner's had to burn it to get rid of them. Nick speaks the poem from the point of view of the bees. Brilliantly crafted. Attention to detail. The details are beautiful.

I read this small book with excitement growing to fierce joy. I'd expected something dreamy and pastoral, or remote, but the charged language took me straight to the frontlines of a fight for existence, love, comprehension. Some of the compact, measured poems felt dangerous, like standing in the middle of a freeway, feeling the heat of traffic speeding past, or leaning almost too far over a cliff, and random thrills of phrases and images came back to my mind, later. Others are more observation, less breathless, but with a focussed fascination. The poems have the structural strength of a well-built old stone wall, which is great, because the perspective zooms wildly in and out, and the whole thing could have just been loopy in lesser hands. The poems build but don't rely on each other, they're broad, and don't spoil themselves for rereading. The language is very physical, accessible, timeless, and sounds as well out loud as read silently. I'm getting a couple more copies, the ones I had were gathered up by curious friends.

Someone borrowed it and didn't return it. So I'm here buying a second copy and was surprised to read bad customer reviews. Nick's fine observations and sensitive explorations of life in the hive are very satisfying to me. What vital person isn't interested in bees or ants, even if only as analogies of us?

I think it was a wise choice for Flynn to turn from the overtly autobiographical poems of his powerful first book to a radically different project. Isn't that a strength for a poet, to be able to switch lenses, discover new ways to make meaning by shifting the formal parameters of the poem? The strangeness, beauty and ferocity of the world of bees becomes, in Flynn's hands, a platform for the investigation of human experience. What better metaphor than the hive to help us think about community and individuality, the whole and the singular? These poems are haunting, weird and alive; they reward the reader's patience and willingness to enter into their world with a remarkable intensity of feeling, and a compelling vision.

Nick Flynn's "Blind Huber" masterfully, with patience and discipline, achieves what few other poets are able to do: the book-length, extended metaphor. Not since Louise Gluck's "The Wild Iris" have I sunk so deeply into a vision of the world conjured through sustained imagery. Here, as he fashions a series of poems from the perspective of bee-keepers, worker bees, foragers, and the Queen herself, Flynn builds a linguistic world around the reader like a hive.