Review, NZPS
A Box of Bees, Emily Dobson, VUP, RRP $17.95, ISBN 0 86473 510 3
Emily Dobson is a winner. Her awards include: 2002 Takahe Poetry Competition; 2004 Adam Foundation Prize for best folio from Victoria’s MA in Creative Writing; 2004 Aoraki Festival Poetry Competition; and the 2005/2006 Schaeffer Fellowship to Iowa University’s Creative Writing Program. Her poems have appeared in a range of publications, from literary magazine Brief to the NZ Listener. Dobson’s first book is an assured debut and, of course, a real winner.
Damien Wilkins aptly describes A Box of Bees: “On one level there are the deeply appealing facts about bees, and on another level Emily offers a wonderfully suggestive account of family and personal life. Her work is sunny, lyrical and beautifully controlled.” It is not just the academics that are falling for her work. NZPS members in Wellington were charmed hearing Emily read back in March this year.
The first thing I noticed picking up A Box of Bees was another perfect Sarah Maxey cover. The poems are quiet little vignettes and at first glance a gentle read, however they sneak up on you like bee in the garden. Deceptively simple and beautiful, they juxtapose pleasures with very real dangers:
he’d received thousands of stings.
Only a beekeeper
could have survived that many.
It is a sign of a good book when you have a pile of juicy little quotes you want to cram into a review. For instance, “….they will become / Queens, but for now / they are only the size / of commas”. Dare I say it? Perfect.
Nostalgic without being saccharine (despite all that honey), the long sequence of couplets provides a sensuous journey beginning with her childhood and youth at Arataki honey, her family’s business in Havelock North. The poems are at once factual – cleaning pollen and harvesting royal jelly – and sensual, the taste and smell of honey and the sound of bees permeates the sequence.
A Box of Bees is a family history of sorts: her parents’ romance in the honey factory; her own first love; her grandparents’ grape-vines; her mother’s poetry; her grandfather’s orchard tree with 101 different apple species grafted onto it. From honey sheds in the Hawkes Bay the poems travel to Crete and back. Quite sexy at times, they always come back to the honey:
The beeswax in the tank
is dark and liquid and aromatic,
hot beneath my face as I lean over
to fill a jug. I can feel him behind me.
We find ourselves
in the honey shed. Fingers dig
into fresh honeycomb – warm and
sticky. He brushes
a smudge
from the corner of my mouth.
Spread throughout the book is an eclectic mix of quotes: from her poet mother; from Sappho; the Upanishads and others. Happily, Dobson makes them her own. She weaves them into her work effortlessly to great effect. The whole sequence is absorbing and clever but she doesn’t take herself too seriously. There’s an undercurrent of quiet humour and, as I closed the book, I realized I had a small smile on my face.
