Illusions of Solid Ground: A Review of YEAR OF THE MURDER HORNET by Tina Cane
While the pandemic was such a repetitious and monotonous period of time, Tina Cane brilliantly provides a unique lens with which to view those haunting years.Year of the Murder Hornet offers a microscopic deep dive into many facets of quarantine life. It allows for wordplay within experimental poems, without becoming oversentimental nor apocalyptic. The wry, humorous, choppy lines in many of the works provide a sense of ease, yet a solemn place for reflection, as well. There is a heightened sensation of unpredictability, which portrays the disjointed, disconnected, mental state of the speaker and many people, for that matter. Societal issues loom large. The threats of racism, gentrification, conspiracy theories, the divisiveness of cable news, and the titular threat of murder hornets are tackled within the comfort (and discomfort) of home. Orderly stream of conscious confessional poems evolve and morph, revealing the blurred lines of the personal and the political. From the first page to the last, it is sharply proven that “memory is a poet / not an historian.”
There is such musicality in each poem’s freewheeling enjambment, which produces kinetic verses, as one is forced to travel back and search for meaning. The complex vocabulary of the pandemic intermingles with layers of experience, “...America / least American Dream-iest of lands” “where like most / I hoard the future and try not to be afraid,” when there was so much to fear. Mentions of “snags in food chains, quarantine baking fails, celebrities sheltering-in, and time no longer having meaning,” all come together in a reckoning from the relative safety of this side of the pandemic-present, “the illusion of solid ground.”
“But what if the thinking / never ends?” Yet feelings of despair and uncategorical delight can occupy the same realms as “this delicate dispatch / to the images I store / of evergreen California / or Ashbery’s / chorus of trees / a stash of small prayers / and promises.” After all, “truth is in / the feeling not the facts.” Repetition recreates the monotony of daily life, only to be punctuated by natural internal rhymes both dynamic and purposeful. These mimic the sparks of unexpected joy that dotted the landscape of distanced schedules. “What We Talk About When We Talk About Paths: A Narrative in Captions” captures the labyrinthian mental and physical passages the speaker takes as they “Walk to Stay Sane” or are “Trying Hard in Trying Times.” This winding piece is in part a collection of daily diary entries, while also a meditative cataloguing of routines, seeking to quell overwhelming fear and anxiety. This captions-style narrative connects two distinct parts of this book, a poetic path unto itself leading the way, while warning, “every day is endless / shortcuts are conditional.”
Every poem reveals a journey narrated by conversations shared between poet and reader, speaker and characters, before posing questions back again. Images succinct as “a cornish hen / houses in a bell jar” commingle with lushly abstract ones like “everything’s gone to hell / since David Bowie died.” Yet a turn of the page doesn’t solve the mystery of the whole, nor the command, “stay tuned to souls / that brood and to poets / who like finches in cages / sense the changes / before they come.” This work begs to be reread, to revisit surreal settings, and to relive the collective emotions, contained within the real and fantasized places held dear in times of trouble.
