A Nature Poet Spreads his Wings
Starting from New York City, to Colorado, to Florida, to Vermont and then to Miami, Michael Hettich now lives in Black Mountain in Western North Carolina. A prolific writer, his poetry, essays, and reviews have appeared widely in journals and anthologies, and he has published more than two dozen books of poetry over the past 50 years. His latest The Halo of Bees, is a large collection of selected poems covering the time span from 1990 to 2022.
Here, in book-titled sections, we get a sample of his work during this period and can, thus, follow the trail of his interests and life from these years and the many places he has lived. Hettich’s style and voice is conversational, experiential, descriptive and reminiscent of memoir or autobiography written in poetic form. He has a lot to share, not necessarily through imagery but by using the standard poetic devices academically attributed to most poetry of his generation. In this sense, the prose poems in the book section “Sleeping With the Lights On” may be the most appropriately representative poems in this collection.
The poems in the first portion of the book are about nature, family, place, housekeeping, weather, childhood memories, education and imagination. About halfway through the collection we arrive at the section (“The Animals Beyond Us”) that includes the book’s title poem “The Halo of Bees” and where almost all the poems are about nature and wildlife. And from here on out the book highlights poems about the natural world and love in its various attributions.
A Nature Poet Spreads his Wings
In the first stanza of “The Halo of Bees” Hettich writes “The jasmine is flowering with so many bees ... Each blossom held a bee/which buzzed until nightfall.”
But then in the second stanza Hettich takes an imagistic leap from decreasing bee population in jasmine flowers to the issue of homelessness and his obvious concern for the homeless living near his own home. In the section titled “To Sing the World,” in the fifth numbered stanza, we see Hettich at his most inquisitive. “I’ve heard this: In every cell there’s something like a universe, energies and relationships that function like our stars and planets, like our light and lives.” A very deeply interesting idea, indeed!
Then in the poem “The Milky Way” he gets more intimately inquisitive:
“And so I would mourn every word I said,
even while I argued passionately for silence
and for learning to honor the sacred diversity
of life.”
Here we get to know Hettich as a truly sympathetic poet and his passion for the health of humanity and all life on the planet — a popular subject these days considering the states of nature and nations that are both teetering on the brink.
Hettich follows “The Milky Way” poem with a poem titled “The Ghost Trees.” Here, he becomes the philosopher, the scientist, the practical observer of the current world we are living in.
“And now a certain kind of scientist says
the weather in various parts of the world
is growing exhausted and just wants to lie down
for a nap, or maybe for a longer dose of oblivion, so its dreams can be
re-spawned, its creatures large and small
replenished to wildness.”
Here, he is sounding very much like the eco-activist that he obviously is. But Hettich doesn’t leave us hanging on a negative note, here in the penultimate section of the book “To Start An Orchard,” but quotes the poet Bill Berkson, (who I knew during my years in San Francisco and northern California), who makes reference to the sky, which Hettich follows by writing “... from the body of a man who blistered his fingers on the clouds/he leaped to grab onto, as though he could become them,/so he could be rainfall;” and then we get a two-page report on the water, the wind, the weather.
Finally in the last section of “The Halo of Bees,” in a numbered series of shorter poems titled “The Melody,” on page 218 we get a love poem that has a more visual poetic form and voice and is one of my favorite poems in this collection and an exclamation point to end this review. Hettich writes: “I’d like to carry myself away/myself, not let you/carry me/but the day is so full/of gleaming, and the breezes/are moving so slyly/through the trees, I feel/alone forever,/as though forever/were alive/like a body—/so I give myself to you.”
About the author: Thomas Rain Crowe is an author, editor and translator of more than 30 books, including the multi-award winning nonfiction nature memoir Zoro’s Field: My Life in the Appalachian Woods (2005). He lives in the rural mountainous enclave of Tuckasegee in Jackson County, N.C.