Incident at the Edge of Bayonet Woods

In this haunting debut, Paula Bohince shows us the complexity of a world that is as beautiful as it is violent, as violent as it is beautiful.In every poem in this collection, Bohince weaves images that dazzle and insights that will break your heart. If you believe poetry can show us what's true about the world, that it can teach us how and why to live, you need this book. I sure do.

Bohince sketches in the essential details of a mystery--the murder of the speaker's father. With a skilled hand, she gives us just as much as we need to know and no more. Thus, we are intrigued and always anxious to read on to the next poem. The poet's narrative skills are enhanced by her deft touch with lyric elements. Perhaps most notable among her many virtues is her ability to create images and then create contrasting images and then weave the two together. For example, when the speaker enters the murder scene in "The Fatherless Room," she describes "worms dried in half-circles / and carpet starry with blood and gunpowder" while outside "there is the shorn field and snow / to make a lacy curtain." In "Acrostic: Outhouse," the speaker contemplates the women who once lived by the edge of Bayonet Woods. While their husbands disappeared into the woods, these women spent their days tatting lace, "gems of fine knots / until their men thread wholly into white roses, / sadly filigreed, as the wild roses / edging the outhouse are eaten by beetles." The rose reappears in "The Gospel According to John." John, a laborer on the father's farm, describes the murder: "When the wet rose bloomed / in the chest of the man I killed, I tried to concentrate / on its image, // tried to sit with that flower and feel / as God must: // the pleasure of His birds swollen with feathers, / His birds bound to the sky, // belonging to His kingdom of violence." This is an outstanding debut collection. Highly recommended!