Customer Reviews

Blind Huber: Poems

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Someone borrowed it and didn't return it. So I'm here buying a second copy and was surprised to read bad customer reviews. Nick's fine observations and sensitive explorations of life in the hive are very satisfying to me. What vital person isn't interested in bees or ants, even if only as analogies of us?

I read this small book with excitement growing to fierce joy.
I'd expected something dreamy and pastoral, or remote, but the charged language took me straight to the frontlines of a fight for existence, love, comprehension. Some of the compact, measured poems felt dangerous, like standing in the middle of a freeway, feeling the heat of traffic speeding past, or leaning almost too far over a cliff, and random thrills of phrases and images came back to my mind, later. Others are more observation, less breathless, but with a focussed fascination. The poems have the structural strength of a well-built old stone wall, which is great, because the perspective zooms wildly in and out, and the whole thing could have just been loopy in lesser hands. The poems build but don't rely on each other, they're broad, and don't spoil themselves for rereading. The language is very physical, accessible, timeless, and sounds as well out loud as read silently. I'm getting a couple more copies, the ones I had were gathered up by curious friends.

Nick Flynn's "Blind Huber" masterfully, with patience and discipline, achieves what few other poets are able to do: the book-length, extended metaphor. Not since Louise Gluck's "The Wild Iris" have I sunk so deeply into a vision of the world conjured through sustained imagery. Here, as he fashions a series of poems from the perspective of bee-keepers, worker bees, foragers, and the Queen herself, Flynn builds a linguistic world around the reader like a hive.

I think it was a wise choice for Flynn to turn from the overtly autobiographical poems of his powerful first book to a radically different project. Isn't that a strength for a poet, to be able to switch lenses, discover new ways to make meaning by shifting the formal parameters of the poem? The strangeness, beauty and ferocity of the world of bees becomes, in Flynn's hands, a platform for the investigation of human experience. What better metaphor than the hive to help us think about community and individuality, the whole and the singular? These poems are haunting, weird and alive; they reward the reader's patience and willingness to enter into their world with a remarkable intensity of feeling, and a compelling vision.

okay... I discovered Nick in an anthology of "dangerous" young poets, even though some of these poets were in their 40's...(is that young, in comparison?) Anyway. I ordered this book immediately. It is a whole book...as opposed to poetry collections that are just that...collected poems. The book is loosely based on the pioneer beekeeper (who went blind). I love bees and so was already biased toward the poems. However, Nick shows such a tenderness to small details, he enters the bees world as often as Huber's, and speaks with authority as both. Drawing on this quiet art as inspiration, as well as the blind man who provided the rest of the beekeeping world with most of the knowledge they now have, Nick crafts poems that are disturbing, soft, and sometimes statements of fact dressed up in fancy garb. My favorite image from one of the poems has the bees filling up the walls of a house with honey. The owner's had to burn it to get rid of them. Nick speaks the poem from the point of view of the bees. Brilliantly crafted. Attention to detail. The details are beautiful.

Nick Flynn: Blind Huber

I know you only through the mind
of a blind man, and the buzzing & the buzzing
overwhelming and elemental, repetition &
obsession, discovery, learning, learning.

I know you only as an insect, instinctive.
Drones and queens and the wax & the wax,
smooth and separating. It is welcome &
warning. You work, building, building.

I know you only as an assistant, medium:
The eyes of a blind man, ocular assistant
daring and trusting, obedience &
consequence; necessary, an instrument, an instrument.

Nick Flynn blows me away. It's a cliche, but still true. Brittle, but still highly emotional. Between Blind Huber and Some Ether, Flynn is building as impressive a library as any poet working today. This time through watch him as he tangles with the same themes as his first book, but through the prism of bee keeping and bee society. Just dandy.

This book has a beautiful cover, but the poems inside bored me. I liked Flynn's first book a lot, so I'm sorry to say this. Some Ether took the unfashionable risk of expressing honest personal emotion.

The whole hive thing could have been interesting, but the language here is at once too stylized and too flat to describe a world as sensuous as the world of bees. This sort of writing does not lie within Flynn's talent at all, and the world he creates gets unnecessarily complicated with the story of the Huber and Burnens characters. It's hard to keep track of who is speaking. Who is Huber? Who is Burnens? Who is a bee? I finally said who cares and gave up. I hope Flynn goes back to what he's good at (maybe better than anyone else) in his next book.

After reading Nick Flynn's debut collection, I was really looking forward to this one. Unfortunately, it's unreadable and fiddles around with the language too much. If you haven't already, get his wonderful "Some Ether" instead.

...this book desperately needs to go play in traffic...