I missed the launch of my friend Kim Fahner’s new book, The Pollination Field, this past week, so I slid a copy into my carry-on bag to read on the flight to Ontario. It’s a book about bees, although other insects, including wasps, monarch butterflies, and especially dragonflies, also make appearances. Sometimes the bees are themselves, in all their apparently cruel and honeyed lives; sometimes they are ways of thinking about heartbreak, grief, and illness. The Pollination Field goes in other directions, too, including solastalgia, notably in “An Elegy for Australia, Burning”:
The kangaroos rush ahead of the flames,
try to outrun the impossible. Days later—
after the firestorm has passed—they are found,
charred statues of bodies caught up in wire fences,
echoes of a shattered nightmare, coloured in inferno.
Among the lyric poems, which draw on the work of artists (Mo Hamilton, Sara Angelluci, Andrea Kowch) and other poets (Jericho Brown, Roo Birson, Carolyn Forché, Vijay Sheshadri), along with marine signals and a wide range of knowledge and lore, are imagined tales about bees. The first, in which a beekeeper becomes enveloped in wax by her bees, reminded me of the art of Aganetha Dyck, except that rather than an object becoming part of the hive, a human does. Fahner also uses a variety of fixed forms, with encourages me to learn more about such things.
So yes, I missed my friend’s launch, but that spurred me to finally read her beautiful book: something good coming out of something bad.