The title of Erin Belieu’s new book of poems, “Come-Hither Honeycomb” (Copper Canyon), is a compact gadget of a phrase that embodies her tinkerer’s style of found puns, verbal doodles, and word games. “Come-hither” is both invitation and command, an adjective that evolved from, but clings to, the imperative. It modifies the word it mirrors, “honeycomb,” which is both the sweet core of a hive and, it turns out, a tropical fish with a sparkly exterior. And yet those showy scales are a camouflage, a defense against predators. Though its body may narrow to an exaggerated pucker, it wasn’t put on the planet to kiss.
Belieu—who grew up in Nebraska, lived for years in Florida, and now teaches at the University of Houston—often explores the relationship between arousal and survival. In “Loser Bait,” we find her title in context. “Some of us / are chum”—used for bait, or friend-zoned—while others
The shiny victim lies in the middle of a punched face. Belieu toggles troublingly between screwball comedy and this sort of violence—part Howard Hawks, part Ovid. When a “hapless nymph” enters the scene in this poem, she dreams of a “layabout youth” but fears a “rapey god” who “leaps unerring, stag-like, / quicker than smoke, to the wrong idea.”
The foundation of Belieu’s language, and also its primary defense, is paradox—the symbiosis of apparent opposites. The poems create insinuations in order to undermine them: the “wrong idea” might, a beat later, be the “right” one. The trapped speaker wonders if she didn’t set her own trap:
That tippy box is, perhaps, a poem, the stick a pen. For a woman who makes her living as a poet, these instruments can also form a makeshift household, reliable where others are not. Of a needy ex who seems to have got the better of a divorce, Belieu writes:
The modern-day Narcissus “finds himself so very well,” when he gazes not into a spring—or well—but into the shallows of a kiddie pool. He should be watching the child who belongs in it, but he’s enthralled by his own reflection, undone by his own thirst trap.
Belieu’s poems often present uneasy pas de deux between rivals, as though strained coöperation were the prerequisite for beauty. She refuses her therapist’s “custom-order hindsight,” and decides instead “to make like Ginger Rogers / forever waltzing backward down the stairs, / partnered with a man who never liked her.” That’s a brilliant metaphor for the retrospective method of psychotherapy, guided not by “faith” but by an empirical “process / of elimination.” The Fred Astaire-like “partner” is an ex, but also, by transference, the shrink. In “Pity the Doctor, Not the Disease,” a weary clinician and a committed drinker have arrived, after years together, at a kind of truce about the costs to the patient’s health:
On her way out the door, blissfully ignorant of the toll being exacted, she spots another drinker, “the same / busted goldfish in his smeary bowl.” She offers a toast in Hungarian: “Isten, Isten, meaning, / in translation, ‘I’m a god. You’re a god.’ ” No “maths” are required for this elegant equivalence.
The ultimate partner—and antagonist—is one’s own mind, surveying “the strange and aging body,” a “nemesis without / a zipper for escape.” In a sneaky villanelle that opens the volume, the intricate form allows the speaker to act as both hostage and captor, offering her own discounted ransom to recruit her next kidnapper. “You’re no great sum,” the woman persuaded of her own worthlessness says to herself. Her power has been eroded: an easy catch, she is left with only one choice, between blinking “once for yes, and twice for yes.”
The lightness in this collection is sometimes strained, deliberately so. Few poems pass without a joke, and some are, to my taste, jokey. But I can relate; Belieu is roughly my age, and, like me, a teacher and a parent. You have to keep pumping out the jokes until you get a response—a pulse, any vital sign at all. Belieu’s corniness is a nervous impulse to counter the unbearable tense silence that surrounds performance. It’s also a form of flinching, another manifestation of the tendency, as she puts it, to “confuse the sum that someone / wants from me with the balance of myself.” Though these poems are sometimes laugh-out-loud funny, it’s the groaners and knee-slappers—poignant for never quite landing—that distinguish Belieu’s style.
The notion of “balance” keeps reappearing in this book. It suggests many things: the balance of years left to a person in her fifties, newly tallying, or tallying in a new way; the balance of unspent passion left over when a relationship, or a period of life, ends; the emotional and physical set points of the aging body. It’s also, as the kids say, a big mood: for every joke in “Come-Hither Honeycomb,” there’s something tragic on the other side of the scale. This commitment to minding her own balance means that Belieu, sitting alone on her porch, keeps a “vigil with no / body, before / no sun.” Some cats turn up, which
“Length” here is a temporal term; a poet works with lines, but they’re powerless to measure the years of life, and of loneliness, that are left.
Belieu’s poems gauge the distance of her past, partly as a way of estimating the span of her future. A competitive diver when she was young, Belieu revisits the evolving meanings of that beautiful, dangerous sport. In this collection’s final poem, “She Returns to the Water,” her comic-creepy coach delivers a pair of shouted maxims: “The dive starts / on the board . . .” and “Rub some dirt / in it, Princess.” The first is a lesson in poise, the second in abandon. Like the art of poetry, diving requires both. Years later, as an adult skinny-dipping, Belieu recalls her younger self:
Now, floating alone—reduced from “two” to one—she thinks wistfully of her compact elegance, tucking and twisting “like a barber’s pole.” Her current body is a “fleshy sack / of boring anecdotes / and moles she’s lived // inside so long.” The future used to be “Infinite,” and every “possible outcome”—a win or a loss—seemed equally within reach. But, looking back, she sees this series of promises as veiled threats: “the silvery tissue” of a ring box, like the surface of the pool or the covers of her book, hides “a costly / gift.” ♦
