Gold Bee

by Bruce Bond

Overview

In his collection Gold Bee, Bruce Bond takes his cue from Wallace Stevens’s Harmonium, bringing a finely honed talent to classic poetic questions concerning music, the march of progress, and the relationship between reality and the imagination.

Blending humor and pathos, Bond examines the absurdities of contemporary life:  “The modern air so full of phantom wires, / hard to tell the connected from the confused / who yak out loud to their beleaguered angels.” At other times, his intricately crafted lyrics weave together myth and history to explore the various roles music and art play in the human experience, as when Bond’s poems meditate on Orphean themes, descending to the underworld of loneliness, commercialism, or death and emerging with hard (and hard-won) truths.

Addressing broadly ranging topics—from a retelling of the story of Artephius, the fabled father of alchemy, to a meditation on a fashion ad’s wind machine—Bond’s voice is always penetrating in its examination, yet wondering in the face of beauty, conjuring for the reader a world where music has “the power / to move stones, not far, but far enough.”

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780809335329
Publisher:	Southern Illinois University Press
Publication date:	08/15/2016
Series:	Crab Orchard Series in Poetry
Edition description:	1st Edition
Pages:	96
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 8.80(h) x 0.40(d)

About the Author

Bruce Bond, a Regents Professor of English at the University of North Texas, is the author of ten books of poetry and has served as the poetry editor for American Literary Review since 1993. His poems have appeared in many journals and anthologies, including Best American Poetry, and Bond has received a number of awards and a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts in recognition of his work.

Read an Excerpt

BONE FLUTE

Music's first instrument was everything
in the wind's path that made the sound called wind,
being elsewhere, summoned to the field
among the screams of reeds along the river.

Or some such thing we cannot quite believe
or disbelieve, since it makes no history,
and we, historians by nature, are always
late as those called late who came before us.

In this way we see in them the moment
we are in, the way music recalls its steps
to walk ahead, and there is no music
without that feeling of coming after, late

as archeologists in love with something
hollowed, and therefore made, by human nature
remade, a bird bone with four small holes
we take in hand and must imagine to see.


GIFT

Where there is breath, there is music
that mostly goes unnoticed. A light
broom sweeps the dust from our throats
and sweeps a little more back in,
so even as we speak we are giving
some measure back, some quiet rhythm
of quickening the world is made of.

Where there is breath, there is the voice
of oceans, the broken shore that flows
seaward as the sea withdraws.
And we feel refreshed, no matter
the particular discouragement,
bitterness even, the loss that curls
the body around its hands in bed.

One part keeps insisting on
exchange, as when the trumpet lends
the bass the solo, and the spot
drifts upstage against the darkness,
and what he plays is dark, a ballad
that smolders from the physical
depths. No matter the particular

light-beam that pools at his feet,
his shadow lengthens as it falls,
the way a tree falls into its shadow,
into those who listen, who must,
as if they did not know the grievous
beauty in them until they heard it,
out there, in ashes, and breathed it in.


MIDAS

My life savings are my picture
of old age as it spends what's left,
the last dollar, the final breath
I never draw, for it's the gold
bird whose song is a still place
that will not die, the sweet unheard
as heavens are and graves and all
they take, hold, and cannot touch.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments vii

I

Kalliope 3

Cello 7

The Invention of the Harp 10

Bone Flute 12

Ivory 13

The Invention of Polyphony 16

Smetana 18

Hero 19

Semper Fidelis 21

Gift 23

II

Prima Materia 27

The Paintings of the Chauvet Cave

Charon 32

Honey 33

The Invention of Paradise 36

Byzantium 37

Midas 40

The Underground Railroad 41

Three 44

Golden Ratio 45

III

A Bridge Made of Water 51

IV

Gold Bee 59

Tooth 62

The Progress 64

Virtual 67

Wind Machine 70

Wings 72

Angel's Trumpet 75

Gold 76

The Bells of Prague 83

Editorial Reviews

In Gold Bee, Bruce Bond is at the height of his powers as he focuses both obsessively and kaleidoscopically on two core subjects—music and grief—exploring how each reaches into us and, ultimately, reconfigures us. Bond’s capacity for capturing music in language is extraordinary. In one poem, he describes a Bach suite: ‘If the fall of rain were a still place, / it would be a song like this’; elsewhere, polyphony is ‘one music pull[ing] its needle through // the fabric of the other.’ But Bond is not merely an effective describer. A complex philosophy of art in relation to human experience undergirds these poems: ‘Those in mourning know what it is // to occupy a space of great stillness, / an ideal . . .’ In Gold Bee, loss becomes a ballast and music the best kind of air we inhabit as our ship moves forward. This is a profound, hard-won, and deeply moving collection.”—Wayne Miller, author of Post-
 
 “Gold Bee, Bruce Bond’s complex and fascinating new collection of poems commences in a series of meditations on the sensual lives of musical instruments—harp, cello, flute, and piano—the materials from which they are forged, and the way these materials mediate both themselves and the memory they contain and conjure. Time, space, light, past, and present, each tucked inside its opposite, appear and disappear as the poems elicit our expectations of harmony, music’s fabled ability to ‘transport,’ and yet Bond’s interest is not so much in where we’re going as in how the magic happens. ‘They’re in there, the powers of invention // that open something . . .’ insists the speaker in the title poem. Ultimately, these poems perform their own version of alchemy: Bond uses the fire of language, music, art making to refine grief, aging, loss into a pure and valuable stillness that allows us to experience knowledge even if it is beyond understanding. Like music itself, Gold Bee’s poems forge themselves in the spaces opened but untouched by human makers and confirm that ‘One half of every metaphor is knowing, / the other the unburdening of what we know.’”—Leslie Adrienne Miller, author of Y
 

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