Book Review

Beckoned Back by Hell-Bent Blackbirds, Broadstone Books, 2025

Spring comes to me always as a reminder—in these tense March weeks before the crocus pierces its green dart through the dirt—that time is still also other than the accumulation of countless hours, but is a circle as much as it is a line, a return to some eternal beginning, a world once again in its first day. Mythic time. H.L. Hix’s newest collection, one of his very finest, Beckoned Back by Hell-Bent Blackbirds, is a book that occurs again and again in just such a beginning, a book of haunted mythic cycle. The primary elements are spare and simple—an orchard, and two brothers:

No one needed Eden more than my brother needed Eden.

No one listened harder than I did for the footsteps of God.

No one was lonelier, ever, than when I and my brother

ventured the orchard together, his world one, mine another.

What is paradise for one who can have no peace in paradise? What is paradise for one who can find no evidence of God within it? Neither question has an answer save some loneliness so lonely it’s hard to imagine. In this paradise, too, there is a fall—the speaker who falls from an unthinkably tall persimmon tree on page 3, and “broke my left ankle, so badly / that my foot digressed ninety degrees.” But some chthonic algorithm moves through those poems, and what one poem establishes as fact, another poem shifts into something far stranger—the broken ankle becomes a broken left collarbone, a broken left arm, a damage to the wrist which now sounds as if geese are migrating forever within it. So, too, of the brother’s endless, deliberate malevolence:

We were just kids. It was his birthday. The BB gun was new.

He must have known better than to point it at his own brother.

Surely he knew better than to pull the trigger. I wore a patch

for a year on my right eye, which wanders now, but does not see.

Then the scene repeats, some poems later, but the BB goes through the temple and lodges in the brain. The brother is violence’s force itself, playing chicken in cars at high speed, killing with glee the creatures of the orchard, and leaving for war—though he comes home with his own wandering injury—kills humans just the same, including the captain of his unit.

A birthmark wanders across the body of the speaker and gathers different names, storm cloud, Antigone, Cassandra, Cordelia; the amount of time between the brothers’ births keeps expanding, from days into years; time seems to move forward, but also doesn’t move at all; I could go on.

I have in strange moments these last many years thought of grammar as a god—look how it can turn a fact into a wish, and then the wish is already gone, before you even had a chance to wish it. I take Hix’s newest book as odd proof of the speculation. The poems all bear the same titles, or nearly so, but the titles slyly shift, subject to the same shifting force that drives the mutations inherent to the lyric strangeness of the poems as a whole. It is as if, all the poems aside, Hix is trying to offer a portrait of some un-nameable force coursing through the world and us all, a kind of grammar that in the end promises nothing other than what you think you suffered and saw, is something other than what you suffered and saw, the ongoing fall from paradise, the portable altar of utmost harm wandering day by day through us all.

Slowly Hix’s world grows more replete, though it never resolves into anything one could call whole. A mother, a father, a house. A shed, a tractor. Some neighbors, maybe. The orchard is what persists, an ongoing mystery reticent of answer:

The orchard told no stories, but did give one message, the trees.

There seasons passed through, not toward a horizon but to earth.

How many steps from tree to tree, how many trees in each row?

Leafed out, the apple boughs lifted the sky; bare, they drew it down.

The orchard told no stories, but did give one message, the bees.

What organized the orchard: not what stayed but what fell through it.

When we tried to measure the orchard, our steps measured us.

In summer those branches concentrated wind; in winter, light.

As force moves its measureless harm through the Cain-like brother into the specific forms of violence, so some infinite vitality moves through the orchard, the leaves, the bees. Somehow, here in these poems, force and vitality are equally troubling mysteries, not opposites, but brethren of differing natures. What stays constant is nothing in the poems exactly, but a catalog, or a drone, cast in grayscale on the righthand margin—it begins as a list of heirloom apples, but veers and varies, into the name of artists, poets, musicians, politicians, and much more. To be honest, I don’t know yet how to read it. Save to suspect that, given the infinite cycle the poems imply is the orchard’s very nature, we might suspect we’ll read our own names there one day, in these pages of wandering hurt and wondering beauty, we who are the apples yet to come.

The Four Horsemen: Poetry and Apocalypse, The Cultural Society, 2024

Hix’s vision is both revelatory and apocalyptic—not that those words, in the end, mean different things. Peter O’Leary is a poet long-studied in the gnostic reach of lyric art, a visionary practitioner who, for decades now, has reminded us of what poems have always been, and so what poems can continue to do. The Four Horseman: Poetry and Apocalypse (out from The Cultural Society, who makes books of such haptic pleasure they’re simply a happiness to hold) builds on courses O’Leary has taught at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in four-year cycles: Dante, Milton, Blake, Whitman. Each poet, in O’Leary’s vision, is attuned to poetry’s ancient prophetic potencies—a potency still coursing through the possibilities of poetic practice. Part of the beauty here is the heavenly constellation of poets vibrating in the void at the same frequency that O’Leary gathers—those named yes, but he turns often to Ronald Johnson, Robert Duncan, Philip Pullman, and many others, who are not imitators of the masters investigated so much as they are mediums of the same vision, poets who have opened themselves to the work of poetry as it’s seldom taught in MFA programs: not poem as self-expression, but self as poetry’s expression.

O’Leary himself is such a poet—one of the primary poets of those poets living now. But such a measure is a poor measure of this vision—for the extent of the life is not the limit of the poem; nor does it matter in whom such spirit sings, it matters only that it sings (as the March chickadee flits from blue spruce to bush). He is also such a critic, though that word feels the wrong word. What recommends this book so highly in my mind is the alternative path it points out for what poetry scholarship might look like—not an arcane exploration of academic expertise, but an enthused initiation into the arcane mysteries poetry still embeds within itself. Thinking isn’t only a road to knowledge’s judgments; it’s also a form of apprenticeship that makes of one’s own mind a mind worthy of others’ minds. To think the thoughts another’s thought. And only then: to speak. Not as yourself, but as yourselves—the sacred horde within you, using your mouth (for what else can the dead do) to say again what they’ve always been saying. The singular multitude. The myriad one. O’Leary’s new collection of essays is primer into such mysteries.