Hive by Suzanne Mercury
Lily Poetry Review Books, 2023
Make no mistake, Suzanne Mercury’s Hive is a divination. Merriam-Webster defines divination as: “the art or practice that seeks to foretell future events or discover hidden knowledge usually by the aid of supernatural powers.” Do these poems reveal hidden knowledge? Yes, through poetics of incantation and an alchemy that turns the white space of the page into breath. And do they foretell the future? Also yes, if we understand the future as a true witness of the present; if we understand the revelations that dwell in wonder.
From the introduction, we learn that the poems of Hive were composed using a syllabic formula from Agrippa’s Magic Square for Venus. Agrippa created Magic Squares for each of the planets, and it is no wonder Suzanne Mercury has chosen Venus. She crafts each poem in syllabic fidelity to the numbers that make up the Magic Square. I love this approach, and even more so—I love this clear line to the past, to magick, to retelling, to re-loving something—in this case: the hive and the honeybee. The honeybee: Mercury’s “earth bones” and “veiled thorax.” And the hive: “an archive” and “an operatic constellation / of pollen.” Then there is this stunning poem describing the generally elusive queen:
The queen is a planet
thinking herself into my palm
Alightment
A liquid star marked in blue
too heavy to fly—
These are beautiful poems with a superimposing layer of mystery—the best kind, the kind that keeps us falling in love with Gods and these incredible creatures of the Earth. Speaking of, I can’t tell if these poems are meant for an audience of ancient Goddesses, like Inanna, or us—simple humans trying to understand what of the Spirit lives inside us. And how do we call it forth? By any means necessary, even magick, even the occult, which perhaps boils down to two things: intention and devotion.
In one poem, Mercury describes the scattered, black-filled cells of the hive as “Spirit Mirrors.” In another, she elevates terrestrial observation to celestial with these brilliant lines:
It was a defect
a wound in the universe
that induced matter to gather
It was a wound that made life possible. Shouldn’t we spend time with it then, this wound that makes love possible? Mercury describes the personality and lifecycle of the beehive as an “episodic decentralized swerve.” How often do we get to be privy to a poet who recites to bees simply because she loves them? In Hive, Suzanne Mercury counts “the rhythms with her body” and names them for us in poems that are true incantatory magick. I bet she does “remember flight : / And the sunflower’s / heliotropic / gaze—”
Only someone deeply interwoven with the Earth and this mortal coil could recast the sun for us as “a levitating library / of early nectar” And so it is. And so it shall be. I finish this review as we turn to Imbolc, the halfway point between solstice and equinox, the pagan festival for Brigid, goddess of fertility, poetry, and prophecy.
Suzanne Mercury is the author of two chapbooks, Sassafracas (Xerolage 69), a collection of photographs of visual poems that she made out of scraps of dichroic glass (Xexoxial Editions, 2018) and Hand to Earth (Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs, 2019). Her work has appeared in a variety of publications including SpoKe, Truck, Summer Stock, Bombay Gin, Sonora Review, Arts & Letters, and Hayden’s Ferry Review, as well as in the anthologies Let the Bucket Down and The Wisdoms of the Universes in a Single String of Letters. A graduate of Smith College and Syracuse University’s MFA program in creative writing, she lives in the greater Boston area where she creates sustainable gardens and keeps bees.
–
Hannah Larrabee’s Wonder Tissue won the Airlie Press Poetry Prize and was shortlisted for a Massachusetts Book Award. Her newest chapbook, The Observable Universe, is out from Lily Poetry Review Books. Hannah is an editor at Nixes Mate Review and she lives in Salem, Massachusetts. She has an MFA from the University of New Hampshire where she studied with Charles Simic.