Book Review: Ophelia: A Botanist’s Guide by Emily Alta Hockaday

Ophelia: A Botanist’s Guide
Poems by Emily Alta Hockaday
Illustrated by Sam Hockaday
Zoo Cake Press, October 2015
24 pp.
Reviewed by Letitia Montgomery-Rodgers

Ophelia: A Botanist’s Guide, a limited edition chapbook by Zoo Cake Press, combines Emily Alta Hockaday’s sonnet sequence about Shakespeare’s Ophelia with Sam Hockaday’s illustrations of each sonnet’s key flower on the facing page. The chapbook collects and aggregates keys to Ophelia’s cipher—stage tradition, the language of flowers, a modern take on the Shakespearean sonnet, and botany, one of the oldest natural sciences.

Hockaday assumes that readers are familiar with Shakespeare’s Hamlet, and her 12-sonnet sequence uses the limitations of a compressed form to plumb Ophelia’s voice. The sonnets read like Ophelia’s undelivered lines, a director’s cut of Hamlet that gives readers more time with Ophelia speaking in her own voice. This move is particularly powerful when Ophelia seems presciently aware or is delivering commentary on the greater action of the play. In “Fennel,” she offers some to Claudius, saying,

This will not cure everything. This will not
raise the dead, it will not
give either of us what we want, I know,
but it is something to receive

In “Pansies,” she says to Laertes, “But—I forget—this is for you, brother / your thoughts. Have mine, half-formed, / and do better with them. And these blooms.” Using Ophelia as speaker within a Shakespearean sonnet sequence makes the chapbook less an intervention in the original text and more an expansion of it. As an intertextual work, it’s a further extension of Hamlet, a poet at play within the raw stuff of Shakespeare’s play.

But while Hamlet asks us to understand Ophelia through the language of flowers, Hockaday asks us to go a step further and understand Ophelia through the science of flowers themselves. One of the oldest branches of science with roots in the Middle Ages, early botany was an effort to identify and cultivate edible, medicinal, and poisonous plants. In “Rosemary,” Ophelia addresses Laertes, sorting the family memories, relationships, and advice triggered by the scent of remembrance. She finally tells him,

many times: There are things to live for,
but it takes choice, I guess.
I take it back, you’ll need no help remembering.
Let this serve a different purpose:

Place a sprig under my pillow to prevent
nightmares from following where you can’t.

The chapbook’s appropriation of botany as guide seems especially relevant as Hockaday’s Ophelia seems engaged in the botanist’s work, using floral tropes to sort her life and relationships into that which sustains, that which heals, and that which kills.

While poems in the sonnet sequence such as “Willow” and “Fennel,” allude to long-standing controversies in Hamlet—Is Ophelia pregnant with Hamlet’s child? Did she commit suicide?—the poems don’t answer these questions any more than Shakespeare’s text does. Rather, poems such as “Nettles” deviate between Ophelia’s nature and her role in lines such as,

Not stinging nettles, but dead, though doubtless you will all
wonder about that later. My skin
beyond feeling. No, I don’t choose, for myself, what is
edible: I feel I have been eaten alive.

In this way, Hockaday aligns poet and botantist. Ophelia may know nature, her own and her plants. Yet, no matter how much Ophelia may know about herself, those around her, or the botanical world, she has limited agency to enact that knowledge or control her own use. For Ophelia and her flowers, society ultimately validates and interprets action and meaning. This may be why Hockaday’s Ophelia ends in much the same place as Shakespeare’s, lamenting in “Violets,” “I told you: they have all withered / the day my father died,” suggesting this Ophelia is as bereft of fidelity and faithfulness in herself, her society, and her surroundings as her original.

By linking botanical illustration with the language of flowers and stage tradition, Hockaday draws attention to an important divergence: an object’s nature and an object’s role. Hockaday’s juxtaposition suggests that navigating the gulf between something’s nature and the role it is given to play is the work of the botanist and the poet equally. Yet, Ophelia is like her flowers, both specimen and vehicle for meanings and use beyond her control. Even with all Hockaday’s play within the play, this Ophelia is as hemmed in by custom and tradition as ever.

 
Letitia Montgomery-Rodgers’ work has been published in Gemini, The Missing Slate, The New Poet, Gulf Stream Literary Magazine, and The Burden of Light: Poems on Illness and Loss, edited by Tanya Chernov. A native of Pennsylvania, she currently resides in Buckingham, Virginia.