The Pollination Field by Kim Fahner (Turnstone Press, 2025)

Books that are utterly entranced by a core subject, set of images or even a haunting word compel me. I consider Tim Bowling's oeuvre of salmon and the river, and also his Tenderman texts, and then too, his tiny homage to his great-aunt Gladys and her early 20th century bee-keeping, The Annotated Bee and Me (2010). As for bee-keeping in Canada in contemporary times, I recently read Jenna Butler's Revery: A Year of Bees (2020), a factual (but still magical) account of the practice that prepared me for some of the knowledge required to fully appreciate The Pollination Field. 

I must say that this book almost felt like it needed to be two texts: one bee-obsessed and the other a sequence of the additional lyrics for her dead parents found in the Cortege section (o how I love the image of her carrying her "father's metal knees" aloft as if "crystal balls"), as well as other pieces such as "An Elegy for Australia, Burning" or "A Note on the Extinction of Brown Bears in Ireland." One, because the book is quite lengthy so it would be served with a splitting off and two, as frankly when I am deep in bees I want to stay there and steep fully. 

The riotous-with colour-and-line cover simply pops (although I would have deleted the blurb - why are we so danged obsessed with this silliness in general - more a mode of showing who we are connected to in our coteries than any necessity for the reader) and works to send us into the mythos of Kim Fahner's encompassing apiary. Here, in lyrics, duplexes, and stanzaic forms are stories of the bee queen who is dressed with the "furry curves" of the worker bees then ensconced in a humming cocoon where she comprehends she is both insect and the hive itself. Later, she dons "fuck-me stilettos" to mate, lays endless eggs and eventually, further humanized, is betrayed and stung, as the question rings: "Would you walk in fear/or in love?" These three tales: "The Queen in the Bee-Loud Glade," "Queen Bee: Mother of All" and the Coda, "A Bee Reflection" read like my memories of Andrew Lang's fairy stories and Ovidian transformations. Moving, strange, beautiful in their simplicities. 

But it is the lyrics in the segments between that I found most intriguing as the bees exit the fantasy realm while remaining surreal, more emotive symbols, slippages between similes and the real as in "When the Bees Fly out of your Mouth" where the bees are first words, then actual insects exiting lips, "throwing themselves suicidal...onto my living room floor" or "Winter at Peggy's Cove, Nova Scotia," where, "Your ghost gave me remnants of a hive to take/down to the shore, wax worn and peeling." This is a true haunting. Also, the deep ecology of "Knocks on the Beehive" where the generational continuance of "keepers" receives homage, as "Bees carry on beyond the humans -- paint the world in pollen, not pain." I am even able to enjoy the usually-shunned word "soul" in Fahner's work, especially when she turns it into a "tiny bee" that "exits your mouth" (Your Soul is a Bee). Other lyrics are also memorable: "Inside Out," the elegies "Memory Box" and "Replacement" (see the metal knees image above) the abecedarian, "Routine" and the titular piece that resonates with Al Purdy's poem "Say the Names." 

While there are some cringy cliches here and there ("full of desire," "broken hearts" or a laugh "pealing/ like a bell"), Fahner's language is mostly as sharp as the sting of honey, and, with powerful poems like "Falling"draws on the bees to speak of the persistence of memory, the necessity of story and the need to "shore" up the foundation of our connection to nature before the bees leave us to a totality of loss.