The Tulip-Flame

Wow! Chloe Honum’s first book of poetry is a winner. She writes beautiful nature poems, ones about living with a mother with psychiatric problems, and ones describing her childhood training to be a ballerina. Check out these lines from “Danse des Petit Cygnes”: “at the studio where I / was one of four cygnets. / Rehearsals ran late. / Night swayed on its green stem…” 

In “Alone with Mother” she gives an emotionally laden image of a child trying to comprehend her mother’s state, “In the car, we sat a long time, / the keys a silver / starfish in her lap, silence // a kind of love between us.”

In “Crossing the Three-Rope Bridge” she not only captures the moment but creates tension in the reader who pictures the scene, a girl at camp crossing a thin bridge over a rushing creek, “I walked, heel toe, heel toe—a fish, the gleam / on a rock below, its wound a swirl of red…And when my foot slipped, the whole / sky gasped. You raised your hands as if to heaven.”