Fluid and Logical but Certainly Not Predictable: A Review of Timothy Stobierski's Chronicles of a Bee Whisperer

I think it is natural when a publisher accepts a book of yours for publication to become curious about who else they have published. The other books they have published tells you something, if nothing else something about your work. That’s what originally got me interested in Chronicles of a Bee Whisperer by Timothy Stobierski, River Otter Press had accepted my book, Bones Buried in the Dirt, for publication in January . . . but Chronicles of a Bee Whisperer was the first book River Otter Press ever published.

Now, the first thing I would like to say is that I really ended up enjoying this book of poems. I found the writing to be very approachable. That may not be a big deal for some of you, but I’m not exactly a poetry scholar. I like reading poetry, but I haven’t devoted the same kind of rigor to its study that I have to fiction. Really, I just like being able to pick it up and enjoy.  And, though the poems in this collection are skillfully composed, they still just let me sit back and enjoy.

When he was a young boy,
there was one promise he made
to himself, the same promise
that you made, that I made, that she made.

(from “Remembering”)

One aspect I enjoyed about this collection was the variety. Some of the poems possess simple and straightforward, honest emotion. This can be seen in this selection from “In the Maternity Ward”:

He can’t help it,
sniffs the newborn’s head;
there’s a slight smell of sweet musk—
fresh peached in spring.
His lips graze the child’s scalp,
nuzzle the vernal pelt.
How soft the flesh,
so prone to bruising;
it must be cradled,
tended with care—
but he’s a big man,
and the child is so small.

Others have such surprising twists and turns that it is delightful just to follow the flow of Stobierski’s mind. It’s an interesting mind, fluid and logical but certainly not predictable, as this bit from “Gastronomica” illustrates:

My girlfriend puts her heart and soul
into everything she cooks,
and it’s nice to know she loves me enough
to tear out those essentials and share—
don’t get me wrong—
but I don’t think she realizes just how chewy valves can be,
or how difficult it is to eat a waffled soul,
however much syrup is applied.

Some of the poems have humor, and some are softly dark. Some are strange, but some have a resonating simplicity. All together, these poems span an impressive range. Whatever you are looking for, it’s probably here. And, more importantly, along the way you will likely find things you should have been looking for without knowing that you should have.

Now, I do admit that poetry isn’t my first love. In fact, I often read it in secret so I can just enjoy the poems and not let anyone know that I’m not an expert. Regardless, I do read it and I do read enough to know what I like. That’s all I really needed to know for Chronicles of a Bee Whisperer, and that’s all I need to know to know that I like it.

They'd Have Yelled If They Found Out: On David S. Atkinson's Bones Buried In the Dirt

Bones Buried in Dirt is a collection of short stories that are linked together to form a novel. This is a literary format that can either go brilliantly, or it can go horribly, terribly wrong. David definitely has written a work that falls in the brilliant category.

The stories are all from Peter’s point of view and follow him from around the age of four or five all the way to around twelve. In these stories, Peter goes through everything from neighborhood wars (“The War”) to first crushes and girlfriends, with sexual experimentation along the way (“Training Part 1” and “Training Part 2”).

I became so immersed in the stories that at times, I almost forgot that the author wasn’t a kid, that these weren’t being told straight from a child’s mouth. David captures the way a child thinks, the way he acts, and the rationales he forms to explain things perfectly. In “The Virgin Mary Tree,” Peter’s friend Joy  has run off into a potentially dangerous situation. Peter wants to stop her.

We were really going to get in trouble if something happened and we hadn’t helped. My parents would have yelled at me and asked me why I had just let her go. Her parents, too. They’d have said she was our friend and we were supposed to have helped. Or maybe they wouldn’t have said it. They’d have thought it though. They’d all have thought it when they looked at me. It wasn’t fair. I didn’t even know what was going on.

He isn’t able to stop her.

I thought I could tell them all I tried. I thought maybe that was going to be good enough. I walked back to the hole in the fence. I might have even gotten in trouble for having been in the graveyard. I wasn’t supposed to go there at all. I still went a lot, but my parents didn’t know that.  They’d have yelled if they found out I went in. Or maybe worse.

Peter’s reaction reminded me so much of when kids do face situations that are outside of their normal contexts. They can’t see exceptions to situations.  Peter can’t see that his parents probably would not have gotten angry with him for being in the graveyard in this situation, because he’s never had a prior situation in which they wouldn’t have become upset at his breaking a rule.

In another story, Peter’s dad has to sit him down and talk to him because a neighbor was just arrested for molesting boys. Peter’s dad wants to make sure that this hasn’t happened to Peter, and Peter is more concerned that prior activities he and his friends engaged in will get him in trouble. The timing in this story is so tight. I could feel myself in both his and his father’s skin, David caught both characters in such a perfect way.

“You can tell me, Peter,” my dad pleaded.  “You have to know you can talk to me.  If something like that happens, it isn’t your fault”

“He never did anything! Honest!”

My dad took a deep breath and exhaled loud.  “Good” he finally said.

I tried not to look at him, but he was looking at me.  I just wanted him to stop. I already told him nothing happened. It made me keep thinking of training.  My head wouldn’t stop twitching, like I couldn’t get my neck to sit right.

David does an amazing job with character descriptions. In just a few words, he sums up a character, and almost everything after that the character does or says, fits in with the original picture he gave of the character.

In his last story, “Cards,” we meet a character named Danny, who is only in this one story. Yet, from the very first description of Danny, I knew him and all his further actions made sense and fit with the picture painted at the beginning.

Danny looked up a little. He sat on a swing like a big old slug. Not swinging really, just swaying around a little scuffing the dirt with his shoes.  The dirt got his black sweat pants all dusty. He probably didn’t care. He always had those dingy things on.

I enjoyed how the stories deepened from one into the next. I felt that it perfectly captured the evolution of what is important to us as we age.  In the first story, Peter is upset over a balloon.  In later stories, he’s upset about way more intricate social relationships. And finally, in the last story, you begin to see the beginnings of an adult empathy to Peter.

There was very little I didn’t adore about Bones Buried in the Dirt or David’s writing. However, in a couple of the stories, Wooden Nicklepayback being the one sticking in my head, David ends the whole thing too abruptly. He does this in a lot of the stories, but in most of them it fits with a child narrating or with the story itself. But this type of ending doesn’t work every time. Also, the only one adult to adult character interaction in the entire book, between Peter’s dad and a neighborhood rival, PJ’s dad, feels false. It’s awkward, but not in the “we don’t know each other but your kid’s beating on my kid’s” way, which might be what David was trying to achieve. It fails though and just feels awkward.

This was a fascinating book to read. I loved it, I loved how I remembered things from when I was a kid because of it, things I felt or said or did.  I loved watching Peter grow up. Certain images that David painted in Bones Buried in the Dirt are still lingering with me days later.

One of the bonuses to reading this was David’s providing me with the best 80s hairstyle description ever.

She had long, nasty brown hair that was all wavy and stuff.  Her bangs rolled up in one of those dumb shredded wheat puff things, like she’d been messing with hairspray again.