The Girl with Bees in Her Hair (Lannan Literary Selections)

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Summary: The Girl with Bees in Her Hair
Review: Like all of Wilner's work, The Girl with Bees in Her Hair is a book on the side of life. It eschews arid, lifeless theory-"inspiration's exhaust"-and looks instead for a muse "who wraps / in her shawl the charred lexicon left / on the steps of the ruined library / next to the toppled stone lion / (. . .) Who won't turn the page / to a grave for the language...." Inspiration comes renewed in attic light falling on a time-darkened painting, on the surface of a pond "-the moon a shiver of minnows," as the gift of a dog who drops a ball at the feet of a struggling poet-her ideal poetics "bright / and round in his mouth, then dropped / like a world at your feet." Darkness also figures in this collection. What's ignorant and blind is named, but there is also the rich unknowable darkness of the cosmos, of the underground, the beginning of things. Wilner's long, graceful sentences spiral like taproots into that good darkness, each twist of the root taking us to a new place of meaning. The single "I" could only with difficulty contain this voice that reaches deep into that dark. Surely this is the kind of book Milosz was thinking of when he spoke of "wise books . . . helping us to bear our pain and misery"--art for life, that sends the statues of worn gods and muses back to the mountain so that "the mountain is whole again, the great rift closed, and young trees grow thick again on the slopes."