These “eclectic” book reviews of mine don’t follow the standard form: they include only books that I’ve liked, which means they have intrigued, inspired, and allowed me to enter the world they create. I appreciate craft — the basket of skills that poets employ to achieve their goals (see writing tips) — in both individual poems and in collections that hold together like smoky single malt Scotch. Frost & Pollen by Helen Hajnoczky does all of that.
Over the last six weeks, I’ve read and re-read Frost & Pollen, a most unusual poetry collection. The first long poem, “Bloom & Martyr,” leads me deep into a medieval garden, much as Alice leads me into Wonderland, plus there’s more than a suggestion of the bawdiness that flows through Canterbury Tales, subtle though it is (or perhaps subtle depends on the mood of the reader). In “Foliage,” the second and final long poem, readers enter a magical wood to become a bewildered Sir Gawain as we take on the persona of the Green Knight of Arthurian legend. Hajnoczky takes us on a wild romp, and we eagerly keep turning pages to match the flow of her tumbling words.
The prose poems of “Bloom & Martyr” almost demand to be read aloud. They blossom on the tongue. Their movement ever forward.
Your blush, my chrysanthemum. Your winter frost, dahlia and molten. My shoulder blades, raspberry and tarnish. Your breath, bloom and hemlock. Your frost, your flush, cold blossom, my mouth. (7)
Maybe you read this excerpt as being as nonsensical as Jabberwocky. It has that sense about it. But when I can let the words carry me as if floating down a stream, I slip into a dreamlike place. I do suggest you set time aside to read the entire poem in one sitting…then read it again.
“Foliage” is a hybrid poem (or perhaps a kind of tanka), since each prose poem is followed by a short lyric. “Foliage” begins in a more pristine world: “And so the boughs burgeoned and blossomed, flourished and failed, / And I dozed—drowsed by the harmonies of life’s rhythms.” With the “arrival of men” desecration begins and the tension is created as we side with the Green Man who wakes “to restore tranquility.” You can see how impossible it is to paraphrase Hajnoczky’s words, how tampering with them loses her headlong momentum. It’s better to read the book.
So, if you’d like to be enchanted by a very skillful poet who will guide you through a garden and then a wood, I suggest you find a copy of Frost & Pollen.
Helen Hajnoczky. Frost & Pollen, Invisible Publishing, 2021 (ISBN 978-1-988784-80-9)
Kathryn MacDonald 