Nick Flynn. Blind Huber. Graywolf, 2002.
Rachel Zucker. Eating in the Underworld. Wesleyan, 2003.

                                   by Chad Parmenter

          Anne Carson’s Autobiography of Red helped to revive the book-length poem, drawing on themes across a historical spectrum. Weaving modern problems and surreal plot development around the characters of Herakles and Geryon, Carson crafted a verse novel that struck a chord with many readers. She mingled traditional narrative and post-modern language theory, and, perhaps most importantly, found a timeless theme loosely embodied by the question, "Who am I?" She wrote it with simple brilliance.
           In Blind Huber, Nick Flynn uses the same gifts for razor-keen lyricism and melding of timeless concerns to exhume a French beekeeper from the 18th century. With society’s unifier, vision, robbed from him by scarlet fever, Huber identifies more closely with the bees, who live in a malleable landscape, judged not by surface details but honey-giving potential:

          Soothing,
as if all I pass were encrusted in wax,
dipped upright–wax bush & wax
bench, wax man, wax tea, waxy cup to waxy
lips, my eyes now more like their eyes. . .

Human society belongs to his past, and he to the hive, where individuality topples before the swarm’s "clockwork," its comb a "city softening, now twisting just out of shape." The book is a host of soliloquies from all levels of the ecosystem. We meet Huber’s assistant Burnens, the swarm as royal "we," the queen bee, a melting effigy of Christ, a boy who sculpts his father in wax, and many others. The genetically identical bees have attained literal unity: "We are/infinitely more abundant/& we are all the same."
           In the human world, complete unity means conformity, from the devotion of warriors whose reward is preservation in honey, to the schoolyard bullies who force Huber to slap his own face for being different. Still, it remains a source of spiritual longing, as in "Twinned":

Think of the hive,

at each turn we find ourselves, not
a version, not a replica,
but our whole selves. Love,

you claim, comes close to this . . .

Drones surrender everything, but are reproduced down to the last gene by the queen, in xeroxed immortality. Humans live in supreme uniqueness, with the yearning to share our spirits completely with others, the impulse of disciples and lovers:

How do you live
with this distance? I have you, she
thinks, or, I know you,

but she can never say, I am you.

          A lively urban metaphor, the bees’ life draws many parallels with ours, but transcends easy symbolism. The swarm serves neither honey nor human, but, in "Queen," acts as conduit between them:

          We know why

you carry our white boxes
to the edge of the alfalfa, to the figs

& raspberries. You take our honey
because we let you. We pollinate the fields

because we are the fields.

Stripped of autonomy, they identify completely with their pollinating grounds. Flynn endows them with emotion in wonderfully understated, fast-paced pieces like "Pheromone":

          The keeper clips

the grass outside the hive,
& the old guard, full of venom,
prods us to attack. We stud his suit with stingers

until we hang dead from the netting,
until he becomes the word enemy. . .

The power of language, to abstract and reduce its subject, parallels genetic code, the script buried in every life form. By losing sight, Huber has sacrificed what made him most human, except for words and their attached memories. If he plays god to the hive, he also needs it as conduit to the sensual world. Many speakers share the quest to transcend individuality.
            Some Ether, Flynn’s first book, delves into his childhood with keen insight and hardboiled courage. The same poignance shows through here, in poems that deal with Huber’s memory and the resentment of worker bees doomed to self-sacrifice. Wearing metaphorical blinders, Flynn opts more often for emotional distance, the detachment of his protagonist. Rather than evolving through the funnel of traditional narrative, the speakers cohere into a sort of composite personality, each rooted in one primary emotion, and one mission. The bees’ life, prescribed and relatively changeless, rises in contrast to Huber’s, and stir more philosophical questions than a sense of tragedy.
           Where Flynn takes history and builds a multi-faceted scaffold around it, Zucker mines myth for its emotive and philosophical bones, offering a stripped-down, lyrical revamp of the Persephone myth. Her first book, Eating in the Underworld fits ancient characters with modern voices and settings. Here, Persephone chooses Hades, liberated from the helpless damsel straitjacket of yore. Hers is a more empowered narrative, of desperation for self-definition. Also, "Diary [On the Banks]" shows her chasing the immortal thrill that comes from fast living:

all the light turns green at once
go go go go go. . .
my voice carries (flag snapping, crack of static)
and comes back to me:

          no one dies in the land of the dead.

The plot progresses through diary entries and letters among the characters, each of whom tries to rescue Persephone, herself most of all.
           The turmoils of the trio, mother, daughter, and Hades, play out poignantly. The split between ancient and modern times gives an edge to Persephone’s musings, like "Diary [Underworld]":

                    Remember the beginning, before science was necessary?

Now we know hot does not change cold in any way.
           They move around each other:
           spreading each other out. . .

Anyone could mistake it for tepid,
           that which is scalding and frozen at once.

The poem speaks equally to the bond between people, how no two natures can truly merge. Persephone’s voice shows a wonderful range throughout, from this clinical detachment underpinned with longing, to the frantic rhetoric of Hades’ bride.
           Throughout the narrative, Zucker deftly switches styles and tones to make the trio real. Demeter’s letters use broken grammar, delving less into meaning than the sensuality of language, mingled, in "Letter [Demeter to Persephone]," with the fragmentation of bereavement:

                In your place

                      there was

                                 a dry color

                                         turmeric?

                       cinnamon, cumin, cayenne?

       but not like color, more like
           cloves, cardamom, coriander

                         like coarse-cut salt on the tongue–

Far from feckless, she lives at the center of fertility, where both words and their objects are born, and intermingle. Hades, by contrast, represents the untouchable, deathless intellect, ferociously devoted to abstractions, viewing time and space from a numb distance. He speaks properly, and couches "Note [Hades to Persephone]" in oily promises:

You will find ardor.

Congeal, extract, distill–
one thousand times.
Solid to vapor and vapor to solid;
you move too quickly for rain.

Through him, Zucker has transformed the impersonal Greek underworld into a metaphor for language, and the inner detachment that competes with empathy in Persephone. To the heroine, the earth represents bondage, and the underworld’s promise of flight, the pinnacle of living. In Hades, she soon sees the tyranny of unfeeling, as in " Diary [Underworld]": "He says when I turn my head away it’s like the word broken." Partaking of both his and Demeter’s personalities, Persephone uses words as monuments to separation, autonomous in themselves:

Even my handwriting is lonely.
Severed legs and spinnerets,

Abandoned dolmens. . .

Zucker shows a clear understanding of the stony archetypes of myth, and their tender, timeless personalities as well.
           The book reads quickly and fluidly, as a linear story, with plenty of lyricism to savor along the way, and lasting questions about longing, transcendence, and return to heritage. Her language remains both elegant and strident throughout, with no extra words. The first half of the book, which traces Persephone’s descent and ultimate subjugation to Hades, presents image with the lush sparseness of a Japanese brush painting. When Persephone resurfaces, in the second half, the poems flower with imagery for a more luxurious read. The relish for detail and form will carry anyone through, with a sense that nature’s fertility infuses language, philosophy, and the natural world between.
            Given a book to run in, with the same overarching characters, both Flynn and Zucker explore every aspect of their personalities. Huber and his cohorts, winged and otherwise, transcend the lacquer of history to resonate on a mythical level. From the Underworld cast, the baroque mask of myth has been stripped away, to enshrine them in the air of modern minimalism. Each, in its own way, shows the strands of heritage that root modernity in myth, and author in character. As in Autobiography of Red, we’re left feeling the author as another, hidden voice in a narrative that sprawls from the book to include us as well, in a fertile timelessness where identities overlap and history, myth and fiction all merge as one thread.