
Book Review: Then Winter by Chloe Honum
Reviewed by Tyler Sheldon
Then Winter
Poems by Chloe Honum
Bull City Press, April 2017
$12.00; 36 pp.
ISBN-13: 978-1495157653
Chloe Honum’s chapbook Then Winter is a dark, insightful study of internal weather. Chaotic elements rage within the narrator and other characters. Honum, whose first collection The Tulip-Flame grappled with a mother’s death, faces in these new poems the unraveling of certainty and any assumed place in the world. Then Winter chronicles the speaker’s time in a psychiatric ward and the episodes leading up to it. In “The Angel,” the chapbook’s opening poem, she meets a tragic, angelic figure—perhaps her psyche—who “since then . . . has gone everywhere with me.” The speaker notes that this strange angel “speaks only to me, as if I were the translator of her / ancient, mottled language.”
A prescient episode occurs later, in “April in the Berkshires.” Here the world is terribly off-kilter for the speaker, perhaps for the first time: “I sob / and the wardrobe steps forward, / like a coffin-mother, to embrace me.” Beginning with this poem, Honum introduces an unknown figure, perhaps a lover, whom the speaker reaches out to in her mind for the rest of the chapbook: “you slid up behind me.” This unnamed character becomes a motif and the speaker’s link to a safer world—which becomes the outside world later.
If the world outside Then Winter’s central psychiatric ward is solid and safe, the speaker does her best for safety and routine within it as well. Normalcy and startling differences mingle here, as in “On the Stairs Outside the Psychiatric Ward.” Asserting her own independence and that of the character she befriends, the speaker “stand[s] with the boy with the twisted body / while the smoke from his cigarette signs its slow signature.” Through the form and content of these lines, Honum creates a soothing rhythm for reader and narrator alike: these characters, despite their various debilitating conditions, can engage easily in casual, normal activity. Additionally, the alliterative “s” sounds in these lines echo the languid movement of the boy’s smoke.
For every restful moment, a frenetic and jarring occurrence presents itself. In “Late Afternoon in the Psychiatric Ward,” a fly becomes metaphor for deteriorating conditions and mental states as it
throws itself
down on the formica table
and buzzes and spins
on its back, quickening
the poison. It resembles
a word scribbled out.
Won’t do, won’t do.
More sedate moments echo this hopelessness as well. In “We’re Supposed to Get Snow Tonight,” Honum’s narrator notices grimness in even ordinary interactions: “Coming toward me, a hooded woman carries a gladiola like a / spine in bloom. She passes without raising her eyes. And the / wind grows colder.” These unsettling descriptions, and the metaphors conveyed via the wind, encapsulate this chapbook’s overarching tone. They also contrast fittingly to Then Winter’s slivers of hope, where “dolphins . . . are swimming in with the waves” (“Stay Beside Me”).
The closing of Then Winter shows the speaker to be a more centered, healthful person, able to carry her poetic knowledge forward to others. In the final poem, “Teaching Poetry at the Juvenile Detention Center in Fayetteville, Arkansas,” the narrator’s positive mind has a place again in her world. When a flea lands on her, for instance, she looks to its minute beauty rather than its negative traits: “A flea appears on my arm and / quivers, like a fleck of onyx.” The narrator also displays empathy for her captive students, who must find unconventional positivity of their own. Everyone, students and teacher alike, focuses on the flea: “In a cement / tomb,” Honum writes, “hope is anything / that travels in big leaps.” Then Winter is one such big leap, a remarkable chapbook that anticipates hope and much, much more.
Tyler Sheldon is a Pushcart Prize nominee and the author of First Breaths of Arrival (Oil Hill Press, 2016) and Traumas (Yellow Flag Press, 2017). His poems, fiction, and reviews have appeared in Quiddity International Literary Journal, Coal City Review, The Prairie Journal of Canadian Literature, The Dos Passos Review, Entropy Magazine, and other publications. He earned his MA in English at Emporia State University, where he studied with Kansas Poet Laureate Kevin Rabas, and is currently an MFA candidate at McNeese State University.
Leave a Reply