“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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