True to the invigorating and allusively sarcastic wit of her four previous collections, Erin Belieu’s Come-Hither Honeycomb operates through a similar lyric sensibility. Take for instance this moment from “In Which a Therapist Asks for the Gargoyle Who Sits on My Chest” —
Charged with speaking honestly,
I’ll confide I think it late for
custom-order hindsight, or rigged
stories spat into our mouths when we
were only infants by the one bitchy
fairy not invited to the party.
What patterns there might be
emerged Cassandra-style,
with inner portents left
for me to sort, then artfully
ignore for half a century …
Here, the speaker, frustrated and dulled by the stagnation felt in therapy, enters what could be described as lyric “spat[s];” “rigged stories,” by method of craft and in enactment of the poem’s trajectory of thought, that render themselves as “artful” distractions from the present. Throughout this particular poem, these lyric tangents take the form of “tourists walking off / of cliffs while taking selfies,” from the Irish attacks on British forts during the Fenian incursion, to the ancient Greek, to the “Easter Island glyphs,” and the performances of Ginger Rogers.
What is ironic about this construction is that through the structural vigor of these lyric wormholes we begin to see glimpses of the self; the speaker avoids therapy through the tangential and piquant movements of mind, but in so doing provides the reader with the intimate knowledge of self-realization that the speaker is chasing. This example might be considered low hanging fruit when trying to pinpoint the underlying “psyche” of the collection. But these modest, logical ironies in the dramatic tenor of self-interrogation happen repeatedly throughout Come-Hither Honeycomb and embody an important aesthetic gesture of the book: how to convey the difficult task of interrogating the self.
It is easier, and perhaps even seductively so, to avoid such interrogations altogether. But Belieu’s collection does not shy away from this project as shown in the opening poem, a villanelle entitled “Instructions for the Hostage,” here in its entirety:
You must accept the door is never shut.
You’re always free to leave at any time,
though the hostage will remain, no matter what.
The damage could be managed, so you thought,
essential to the theory of your crime:
you must accept the door is never shut.
Soon, you’ll need to choose which parts to cut
for proof of life, then settle on your spine–
though the hostage will remain, no matter what.
Buried with a straw, it’s the weak who start
considering their price. You’re no great sum.
You must accept the door was never shut
and make a half-life there, aware, apart,
afraid your captor’s lost you, so far down,
though the hostage you’ll remain, no matter what.
Blink once for yes, and twice for yes–the heart
makes a signal for the willing, its purity sublime.
You must accept the door is never shut,
though the hostage will remain, no matter what.
The most interesting switch allowed by the villanelle is the blending and unifying of captor and hostage, made most evident by the turn of “your” in the third stanza: “Soon, you’ll need to choose which parts to cut /f or proof of life, then settle on your spine.” The “your spine” turns away from generalized hostage to an offering of pricey self-collateral. Unique to the villanelle is the ability to overtly transform the association of the foundational clauses throughout which is done to great effect in the 4th and 5th stanza: “You must accept the door was never shut / and make a half-life there, aware, apart, / afraid your captor’s lost you … the hostage you’ll remain.” Now that the “your” has fully been switched from universal hostage addressee to addressing that of the speaker and the self, in Stockholm syndrome-esque manner, the emotional framework for the rest of the collection cements.
What begins to be established by the end of the poem is a transactional give and take between captor and hostage, the self and the locked-up-by-the-self self. How do we, held hostage and suppressed under six feet of dirt breathing through a straw, establish trust, mediate, and begin to hold conversations honestly between our captive and captor selves? How do we become “willing” to do so? How do we summon the courage to “blink once,” “blink twice”?
The second poem, “Loser Bait,” advances these questions,
Some of us
are chum.
Some of us
are the come-hither
honeycomb
gleamy in the middle
of the trap’s busted smile.
Though I let myself a little
off this hook, petard
by which I flail,
and fancy myself more
flattered –
no ugly worm!
In these first few lines, Belieu clearly points us to the eponymous rendering of her collection and further troubles the elusive nature and complexities of self-interrogation. Utilized in the context of fishing, the “come-hither honeycomb” is a lure, “gleamy in the middle,” fabricated “chum,” which is used to bait, trap, but more importantly, seduce. Both oddly peculiar and witty, the construction of describing a lure as a “come-hither honeycomb” describes not only the physical shape but emotional affect of the thing being lured. It’s sweet and, with sexual underpinnings, seductive. The relationship between predator and prey is one that both exerts power and must be evaded. Anthropomorphizing in this manner allows Belieu to elucidate another logical irony of the speaker: that which thinks themselves the hunter (the fish racing to catch the lure) is also the prey (the fisherman controls the lure).
Wielding syntax that is piercing in its hypotactic sarcasm, throughout Come-Hither Honeycomb Belieu is able to bait the reader, as much as the speaker’s self and subjects of examination, through these lyric “spat[s].” Take for instance the next stanza of “Loser Bait” which reads, “Humor me / as hapless nymph, straight outta Bulfinch’s, minding / my own beeswax.” In this particular instance, Belieu’s speaker unwinds into another hypothetical thought experiment, moving from fish to Greek mythology, but also one with fresh allusions and puns (we of course hear the play on N.W.A’s “Straight Outta Compton” and an echo of “honey-comb” in “beeswax”). What this allows Belieu to accomplish, among other explorations in this example, is an investigation of the potentially detrimental internal logics of self-doubt:
until spied by a layabout youth,
or a rapey god
who leaps unerring, stag-like
quicker than smoke, to the wrong idea.
Or maybe
the right?
The logic, syntax, and threads of elusory referents are layered, full of trick mirrors and reversals, double takes, and falsehoods. This allows the speaker, by way of Belieu’s craft, to mimic doubt and questioning that the self faces under scrutiny or examination by the self.
Admittedly, operating under this sensibility one can run the risk of becoming too witty, too palpably “rigged” — a disjointedness between humor and logic that could leave a reader baffled, waiting for another line (bad pun absolutely intended) to be cast.
I think Belieu mainly avoids this through a measured interspersing of poems that take on a more musical and syntactic experimentation (as in the poems “In Airports” and “Please Forgive Me All That I Have Ruined –”) and poems that operate under different personae, most prominently those which experiment with gender (notably “When I Was A Teenage Boy” and “The Man Who Fills In Space”). Although these poems offer brief intermission, they represent, perhaps to one’s excitement or one’s cerebral consternations, deviations that sometimes require space for their own sensibility to unfold, thus necessitating their own patience.
But it is a patience, even as an element of craft, that the speaker in turn grants themself. Near the end of the collection the poems largely turn toward a language of self-forgiveness and introspection as the first lines of “Please Forgive Me All That I Have Ruined –” demonstrate,
is what I wrote in a letter four years ago
and which in retrospect feels painfully
ridiculous the lyric flourishes absurd …
Though it isn’t like I didn’t pony up for all
my EXTRA. I took that check for every meal
always ready to confuse the sum that someone
wants from me with the balance of myself.
That which we give and our perceived misgivings are transactions, debts incurred to the federal bank “of myself.” These debts can later transform themselves into silences, “My son says he’s convinced if we were predators / we’d dive more silently than barn owls.” It might be said that silence could branch off into more perceived misgivings and on and on, a positive feedback loop rendering the self-held-captive even more so. But, in the final poem of the collection “She Returns to the Water,” Belieu offers an image of blunt absolution,
the kind of woman
who swims naked
without asking
for permission, risking
a stray neighbor
getting the full gander,
The speaker of these poems is both predator and prey. Captor and hostage. Debtor and creditor. Logical ironies, sarcasm, playful musings, while difficult sometimes to track, permeate Belieu’s new collection and ultimately elucidate the difficulty of self-interrogation and reflection. No answer is never either black or white. No process of healing is ever a straight line.
To some, it may feel like something that’s just out of grasp, a glint that we chase in the murky waters of the mind. How then do we bait and lure that “loser,” the self inundated and buried with doubt? What are the costs of self-interrogation or of being seen? And can we, or rather, should we, do so without receiving a “full gander”?
Come-Hither Honeycomb is relentless in its aesthetic exploration of these questions, but it also dispenses breadcrumbs of optimism, as in “Dum Spiro Spero” where the speaker states, “But while we breathe, we hope.” A moment of collectivized deviation from the singularized Latin offers, among much division and separation, the sequestered but resolute thread of love and unison to be pulled out from under the dirt.
Belieu’s Come-Hither Honeycomb is a short collection, comprising only 15 poems, but it’s a book that, through patience, rewards through its complexity of craft.
[Published by Copper Canyon Press on February 2, 2021, 64 pages, $16.00 paperback]