Blue Honey by Beth Copeland

Nothing is harder than losing the ones we love. And losing them in slow-motion, watching the persons they were disappear in their own bodies — “the long / goodbye” — is a harrowing process. Poet Beth Copeland grants her readers full access to her life, loss, and love in the new collection Blue Honey, winner of the 2017 Dogfish Head Poetry Prize. Each poem is deeply personal, giving honest, heartbreaking snapshots of how she lost her parents told through moments from her childhood, marriage, and parents’ battles with dementia.

Primarily told through a reflective lens, the poems of Copeland’s childhood show her spirited, adventurous parents before their abilities were lost to Alzheimer’s. Missionaries in Japan, there are stories of her parents’ cross-ocean voyages which help contextualize the deep loss of personal identity experienced through their battles with dementia. These journeys also serve as haunting analogies for the final one they are on: “When I ask / where he went, he blinks as if / returning from another / hemisphere into daylight, still / adrift between this continent / and the next.” The juxtaposition of the tragic late-life realities with the vibrance of youth are heartbreaking. Copeland writes, “When / I was small . . . I believed / he could hold back / time forever, a pulse that / would never stop” — a painful illusion one learns the truths about with time.

Copeland’s honesty throughout the collection is moving and purposeful. It gives a thoughtful and balanced reflection on the challenges and frustrations of mental-faculty loss for both the afflicted and the loved ones watching the disease take hold. We are shown her father’s struggles to speak and swallow, as well as her mother’s rapid memory loss. Towards the end of her life, her mother would quickly forget things she’d just done or said. Her mind refreshes and repeats. Copeland’s love and sympathy are well highlighted, but she doesn’t sugarcoat the challenge: “I want / to talk to her, but I want / to hang up, too, after listening to her / refrain like grooves on vinyl.”

The difficulties of Copeland’s own marriage, seen in poems such as “Cleave” and “Sweet Basil,” show not just the tolls losing one’s parents can have on our relationships with others—“Is this pairing of pain / and passion the moon’s / push-pull”—but also help contextualize the miracle that was her parents 66-year relationship and the agony of watching their lives now. Copeland articulates the situation with gut-wrenching honesty: “I love them but want / the blade to drop / the bleeding to stop.”

Each expertly crafted poem is beautiful-written but accessible. Together, the poems give a clear window into Copeland’s memories, experiences, and thinking. They show the grim realities of Alzheimer’s destructive powers. But these incredible poems also show that even in the worst of circumstances not everything is lost. “A mother’s love never vanishes,” Copeland writes, “fixed as / the North Star with no stops in a midnight sky.” Disease can take away mind and body, but it can’t take away love: “I hold / her in the heart / of my heart / where she’s whole.” Pain and sadness are inescapable realities of this world, but Blue Honey grants us the necessary reminder that there is so much more.