Adam in the Garden by AE Hines Review by Russell Karrick

Adam in the Garden by AE Hines

Review by Russell Karrick

Publisher: Charlotte Lit Press

Publication Date: March 1, 2024

ISBN: 1960558072

Pages: 100

Heaven Nowhere But Here: A Review of AE Hines’ Second Collection, Adam in the Garden

In his second poetry collection, Adam in the Garden, AE Hines taps into the very marrow of what it means to be human: to have a body and be on a quest for knowledge, or more precisely, truth. I’m not talking about facts but the experience gained through a life of keen awareness and discernment. Suppose we trace the word “knowledge” back to its Indo-European root “gno” or the Greek word gnosis, which can translate to insight or spiritual knowledge. In that case, we get closer to understanding the speaker’s journey, not simply as experiential but also esoteric, as the speaker delves into the great spiritual mysteries of being.

In many ways, the symbol of the garden is cyclical. It’s the place of man’s first wound, but it’s also where man learns to heal and where the speaker finds some of his most profound spiritual connections. That said, Hines informs the reader from the opening lines that the garden is not always Edenic.

In “Astronauts,” the collection’s first poem, he writes, “It was dangerous then, / making love / in a Carolina backyard.” It’s a sentence that resonates with meaning, both playful and grave. In the following line, we learn the speaker and his lover are in a hammock. On one hand, there’s the speaker’s fear of falling. In this case, something quite literal. However, the reader shouldn’t ignore the allusion to Eden. There’s also the larger danger, the cultural implications and hostile views of homosexuality in the South, a theme further explored in later poems, such as “Postcard from the Dead” and “The Night the Lights Went Out in Moore County, North Carolina.” But here, in this Carolina backyard, these lovers are “back to back.” A detail worth noting.  A detail that shows man in his fallen state, where fear, shame, and guilt are all part of our inheritance, especially regarding our bodies and sexuality. Despite this, beauty surrounds them—the stars abound and lightning bugs orbit the lovers. It’s clear that excitement is also in the air as Hines writes, “We floated toward each other, / summer astronauts / on our first expedition […] each of us / edging closer / to discovery we could not / yet name.” Among the many lessons of Eden is that with loss comes gain. Humanity’s curious nature, our desire for knowledge in more ways than one, allows man now, as it did in Eden, to overcome the imposing limits of authority and explore the unknown. 

Throughout the book, the garden reshapes itself. At times, it may evoke Eden or a re-imagining of it. At other times, the human body or even the poet’s backyard in Colombia. Not unlike the way Adam transmutes various male roles, including father, son, and husband.

In the poem “Breakfast in South America,” we get a taste of Adam before the fall. One of Adam’s tasks was to name things. In Genesis, the world of being and relationships come into existence through speech. But in this poem, the speaker refuses to name the “great blue-green bird” that follows him each morning down into his earthly garden. Not naming the bird allows a deeper space to wonder. It enables the speaker to revel in the mystery of a place that endows such beauty. But as much as it feels like Paradise, or is paradise in many respects, it is still a tainted world, and the sublime moment is interrupted rather abruptly, as if all this color and life were too much to handle, as the speaker mournfully remembers “this bright world, blue and green, is dying.”

In his poem, “Adam Before Eve,” Hines writes, “Adam gave up on Paradise too soon,” but don’t we all give up on paradise too soon? Is it not within our nature? Perhaps this line is a wake-up call to humanity, insisting that the garden is a place equally external as it is internal and that we should recognize this connection. For the speaker, the remnants of paradise are more readily visible in his Colombian backyard, where endless waves of green can dizzy a man, exotic birds and butterflies floruish, and the bounty of fruit trees feels endless. But even in the city, twenty-two stories up, clipping his toenails, the poet sees his grandmother in the likes of a fat city pigeon, as he writes, “With your steel / petticoat and grey patrician gown, you / could be my grandmother, lounging / in her jeweled necklace of amethyst and jade.” Not only is this description fabulous, but he asks, “Have you come back to sell me on Heaven?” The speaker replies, “Heaven / nowhere but here.”

These lines strike an essential chord in the collection—the diversion of spirituality from religion and often the dogma that can divide the paths. I can’t begin to imagine being raised in a frenzied household full of fire and brimstone and the challenges of being gay while growing up in the South.  In his poems “The Fall,” “First Time She Goes Missing,” or even “Family History,” the reader gets a taste of the speaker’s violent upbringing, “Where police were summoned / and dishes went flying / and furniture ran crashing into walls.” The evocation of these images and what they bring to the imagination—loud sirens, flashing lights, the intentional breaking of things and people, and, out of all places, the home—is full of chaos and hurt. The most haunting of all comes from Hines’ superb line breaks, which help build suspense and surprise, while creating such emotional complexity when he writes, “where people / went missing / down the dark corridors / of their minds.”

However, one of the many things I admire about Adam in the Garden is the full spectrum of human emotion that it envelops. How despite the suffering and pain found within its pages, Hines continues to find the beauty, joy, and humor in the day-to-day.

For example, in his poem “On the Nature of Time,” the poet finds himself again, decades later, in a hammock. But instead of a cocoon of sexual exploration, the hammock becomes a metaphor for life: “I am fifty when I understand time / as a threadbare hammock, busy / loosening, slipping itself free, / how it threatens to unravel / and spill me across the broken ground.” I love how the poem reveals time’s cyclical nature and, still, the fear of falling—the body, an aging garden, wearing away like anything else. But my favorite lines are when the speaker says, “I am fifty when a doctor / pulls from my inflamed anus / twelve polyps, like twelve / angry apostles drawn / reluctantly into the light, / tells me come back in a year, see which might be my/ Judas.” These lines are an example of the poet’s fine craftsmanship. The stunning and surprising use of imagery, the cadence that gives them lift, and the brilliant use of metaphor that makes these poems memorable and worth re-reading.           

Adam in the Garden reminds me that the Infinite, the oneness, whether one is comfortable calling it god or not, is only made to manifest through the divided and broken world. We are the garden, the trees that uprooted themselves and wander the world lost. But as Hines shows us, we don’t have to look far, or even too deep, to witness the small miracles of life that surround us.

In the closing lines of his poem, “On the Nature of Time,” he writes after the doctor tells him to come back in a year for a check-up: “A year seems a long time / to wait. Then no time at all, / as I go on swaying to stillness / in the gathering shadow, sun / bleeding across the sky / like a stone rolled from a tomb.” This is another reminder that it’s the division that allows us to see and experience beauty. We don’t have to learn that a sunset is beautiful. As the poet allows himself to be seen as he is, we also have to be willing to be seen as we are, and be willing to heal that mortal wound so we can see and come to know the beauty within ourselves and one another.

AE Hines is the author of Adam in the Garden (Charlotte Lit Press, 2024) and Any Dumb Animal (Main Street Rag, 2021). He has won the Red Wheelbarrow Prize and Palette Poetry’s Love and Eros Prize, and has been a finalist for the Montreal International Poetry Prize. His poems have been widely published in such journals as The Southern Review, Rattle, The Sun, Prairie Schooner and Alaska Quarterly. And his literary criticism can be found in American Poetry Review, Tupelo Quarterly, Rain Taxi, and Northwest Review. He received his MFA from Pacific University, and resides in Charlotte and Medellín, Colombia.

Russell Karrick is a poet and translator who lives in Colombia. His collection, The Way Back, won the 2023 Slapering Hol Press Chapbook Competition, and he is the recipient of World Literature Today’s Student Translation Award and Lunch Ticket’s Gabo Prize for Literature in Translation & Multilingual Texts. His poetry has appeared in Redivider, The Offing, Bat City Review, Spoon River Poetry Review, and Magma Poetry, among others. Russell Karrick earned his MFA in creative writing from Fairleigh Dickinson University.

26 June 2024