Reviewed by Anne Graue

The poems in David Graham's collection, The Honey of Earth, meander through personal time and memory, traveling down roads past and present and, in some cases, imaginary. Graham imagines how Jesus would drive, "lingering forever at intersections, letting others / go first," and conveys his love for America in a list poem that includes "the Constitution, Langston Hughes, / the Tappan Zee, Macintoshes whether fruit / or computer, Dolly Parton, Huck Finn" among other reasons to cherish where he lives. The collection is at times a nostalgic drive through small town USA as well as matters of the heart, mind, and body with some regret, some longing, some humor, and always some love along for the ride. 

With original and rich imagery, Graham tells stories in his poems filled with observations and conclusions, summing up a life that is still going on while simultaneously looking back. A number of poems contemplate aging and death, while others take us on small town journeys. In "Feedback," there is a dark humor at work in elegiac tercets as the speaker tells us, "Like every dipshit faded mill town / we're Historical," and then proceeds to list the telltale signs of maturity with images such as "yard dogs lying flat as rugs" and the "vague smell // of hog shit drifting in from the west." The poem's title shows up in a younger brother's cheap amp spewing guitar sounds "as loudly as he dares." The first section of the collection is comprised of poems that similarly strike a mournful tone exemplified by indelible imagery of a grin evaporating "like dew from midmorning asphalt" and an observation of "goldfinches stitching / the air tight." At the end of the first section, tone and mood have established dominance, foreshadowing elements of the sections to come.

The sections that follow do not disappoint expectations of a thematic design. Poems that yearn for youth and look back on life are prominent and submit to a loss of time that has a finite end. In "David Divides his Time," Graham offers a third person account of his relationship with time admitting:

He often divides his time badly, 
always with some left over—
too small a portion to use,
too great to just toss away.

In this and other measured stanzas in the poem, Graham examines how time passes while somehow tricking us into thinking it is no big deal, and how what we do with our time is superfluous to its linear existence. As much as we like to think we are masters of multitasking, time cannot be divided without consequences; it governs us in spite of how we might want to manage everything. Time plays a significant role in another poem, "Thou May'st in Me Behold," in which "Fall's doing its misty thing, / leaves swirling to the ground, and most of us, / it seems, are a little past our sell-by dates." Sonnet 73 adds some gravitas to what our mundane lives might throw at us while we consider our place in the entire scheme of things. Similarly, William Blake is called on in "Sand Against the Wind" to consider how turtles understand time. The speaker has faith that they know "there are only so many hours // in a day." But he is unsure of their understanding of years, thinking it might be "beyond / a turtle's ken—who can say for sure?" The poem is more an indictment of how humans spend their time online "scanning vids and memes" when it is "Better to just feel sun warm your shell for / as long as you can, then plop back in the pond." The metaphor is not lost on us. 

Two poems in the third section of The Honey of Earth serve to enlighten as to what is really going on in life and in Graham's distinct view of it. In "Which Is to Say" and "Heaven Changes," the speaker pulls no punches to protect our sensibilities. In the first poem, he concedes, "Now that I'm old, I'm oddly / nostalgic not for childhood / but for my thirties," when "getting gin-and-tonic'd / out on the unburned lawn" was a conscious goal and remembering all the parties and drama of being thirty-something is "a vast oversimplification / based on the inscrutable / holy mystery of time," denoting nostalgia, ironically, as another waste of precious time. The second poem is more about how people change, and when they say good-bye to their younger partying days, they are in fact moving closer to their last days on earth where heaven is "like a rainbow glistening in a field" and they are approaching "the rainbow in all its glory" that "just vanishes, gone in a blink," leaving them with existential angst and vagueness. These two poems express longing and regret in language that serves to operate on our emotions in individual and divergent ways. 

The trajectory of Graham's collection follows the logic of storytelling and ends with a denouement of feelings within a speaker who is receptive to a finale that embraces every last emotion to be experienced. In "Ode to Baraboo, Wisconsin," a town that boasts to be "The 54th Best Town in the Nation" on a road sign, Graham revels in the town's self-image admitting:

I'm not one to judge, of course,
being merely the ten-thousand-eleventh
best poet in the universe, but
apparently I'm the very first
to happen upon Baraboo, Wisconsin's
shining truth.

It's yet another town to tour and take in all that it has to offer from its "elastic and middle-aged" place on the list. And just when the journey seems to be coming to an end, it goes on. Graham's title poem "The Honey of Earth" makes use of language from Wallace Stevens in a way that leaves us chock-full of feeling and incomplete all at once. This final fitting piece poses a challenge to see the world for what it is without losing what is important. Memory, longing, growth, and possibility converge and "Beneath the tumble and flutter of snow / lie bulbs stored in ice-lock, ready to burn / and shudder upward from their own decay."