Review of Then Winter by Chloe Honum

by katherine frain, guest book reviewer

The only unfortunate part of reviewing Chloe Honum’s writing is that next to her glistening abilities to transform even the most worn-out concepts like angels into vivid, bloody new meat, all my praise will seem flat. Then Winter is a slim chapbook – 25 pages, thin enough to sneak into a textbook and thick enough to allow an elegant professional binding – and yet she manages to make each poem a perfect, crystalline note that leaves a reader both satisfied and reeling.

Chronicling days in an outpatient program of a mental facility, Honum perfects her precise, startling capacity to give new life to old images alongside her ability to translate full and essential scenes in mere breaths. Perhaps most well-known for her poem “Alone with Mother”, which beautifully encapsulates the relief, torment, tension, acceptance of a mother-daughter relationship, Honum returns in Then Winter to hollow out a space for herself alongside Jane Hirshfield as one of the best short poem writers we currently know.

Recurring characters and unspoken stories haunt Then Winter, which takes on a nearly Autobiography of Red vibe in its undercurrents, the recalcitrant Vietnam veteran eerily similar to Geryon in both backstory and tendency to speak around a point. The psychiatrist, the dog, the snow, the flies both living and dead – these all become central to the story, and sometimes it seems that Then Winter is less a book of poems and more a refracted portrait with light coming in on all sides.

“The psychiatrist has a face like/an old dictionary.” The image is unexpected and beautiful, but even the line breaks in Honum’s work speak to a deep uncertainty – in the context of the poem, a prose block in the middle of the page, it’s not even entirely clear that they exist. They could be the reflex of a reader too used to a traditional format to accept that one will no longer work, a reader searching for meaning where there is deliberately none to be found. It’s one of the most subtly effective tricks of the books, slipping in these little jabs at a reader’s sense of self in a way that produces an off-kilter empathy for a woman in psychiatric treatment who has obviously herself found the reassurance of old ways slipping.

I would like to say something is off with this book, that something is wrong in a way. It’s the reviewer’s job to pick and keep picking, like a ten-year-old boy with a scab fascinated by the reality of his own blood. And yet nothing naturally rises to the surface – no flaws, nothing I’m inclined to take by the edge and pull. Then Winter is a mirror. It is a pane of glass. It is, at its heart, an opus waiting to be made.

Do I think that there is a chance that Honum will one day be taught alongside the works of Carson and Hirshfield, mentioned in the same breath as Olds and Simic? No. I know it. Already there is a transcendent quality to her work, which falls both as lightly and coldly as snow across the reader’s back. While it might be interesting to see what happened if Honum expanded her moments of pure originality, her revitalization of poetry’s most basic images – the mother, the snow, even, God forbid, the soul, which seems to loom quietly in the pages like a ghost in a corner – is a project that has borne fruit of the most bitter seed, and seems poised to blossom again.

This is one of my shorter reviews. To quote more than a line of poetry in a book this short feels like fraud, somehow, like depriving the author of the readers who should be lined up. I will give nothing more than a taste and the promise – to those who read Then Winter, more sweetness and bittersweetness is to come.

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