978-0063096288
2021, Ecco
$12. 112 pages, paper
(sponsored link)
Reviewed by Dave Seter
Amanda Moore’s debut poetry collection, a National Poetry Series Winner selected by Ocean Vuong, explores themes of motherhood, women’s roles in society, injury and dislocation. And more: Moore’s communal hive comprises biological family and the beekeeper’s backyard, a collective linked by hunger and the need to feed and survive. Requeening represents essential reading for a society reflecting upon its relations with each other and the planet.
In the title poem, “Requeening,” a novice beekeeper assists a loved one and observes the decline of the hive, lamenting: “I am irritated like the workers / returning with nectar.” When the partner tells her the queen needs to be replaced, she feels conflicted: “She was the first queen / I spotted on the comb when I learned to tend hives.” But the fate of the queen has been decided, as expressed in the poem’s last line: “I know you will crush her before I can argue.”
Moore’s collection deftly explores the hierarchy of human relationships, focusing on the daily choices we make to sustain our lives and nurture family, sometimes eliminating other beings in the process. In the poem “My Still Life with Wasps,” Moore’s narrator speaks of a home with wasps living in the walls: “A house swells with wasps / that will be carried out / only by death.” It only seems right that reflections on life, and death—and hunger—occur in the words of a mother, bearer of life and protector of her brood.
The poems about motherhood will engage a broad audience. In “Nursing,” the language is vibrant with life: “Begin here: the baby / whose mother’s breasts float above the cradle / like planets.” The poem “Confession” provides counterpoint: the baby will not feed. Moore writes: “I put you to my breast again and again / and let you refuse me.” She reflects on this complication: “you will learn to be a woman / from the way I am a woman.”
As we learn to feed ourselves, the human act of beekeeping provides its own lessons. In “Afterswarm,” the narrator observes her first bees have “slunk over the fence / in search of their truant queen.” Her loss is mitigated by the opportunity to feed: “What an easy harvest! / My first, no need to leave honey / so bees would overwinter.” And yet, the mother, thinking of future broods, resolves: “I will be alive this time / to what swells and roils the colony.”
In terms of craft, the collection includes a number of haibun, in which passages of prose are followed by haiku. Moore modernizes the form. In one striking example, “Self-Defense Haibun,” a mother watches as the instructor challenges her daughter to counterattack the attacker’s eyes: “’Eyes!’ commands the instructor in the corner, / and I realize mine are wet.” Moore’s examination of the mother’s role in society will prove compelling not only to mothers. We all have been nursed and mothered, often without contemplating this source of life. Requeening provides us with that opportunity.
Published in Cider Press Review, Volume 24, Issue 1.
Dave Seter is an ecopoet and the author of Don’t Sing to Me of Electric Fences, Cherry Grove Collections (2021). His poems and critical works have appeared in Appalachia, Cider Press Review, Confluence, The Hopper, Paterson Literary Review, Raven Chronicles, and other journals. He has received two Pushcart nominations. He earned his undergraduate degree in civil engineering from Princeton University and his graduate degree in humanities from Dominican University of California. www.daveseter.com.
Amanda Moore’s debut collection of poetry, Requeening (Ecco, October 2021), was selected for the 2020 National Poetry Series by Ocean Vuong. She is the recipient of writing awards and fellowships from The Writers Grotto, The Writing Salon, Brush Creek Arts Foundation, and The Saltonstall Foundation for the Arts. Currently Poetry Co-editor at Women’s Voices for Change and a reader at VIDA Review and INCH, Amanda is a high school English teacher and lives by the beach in the Outer Sunset neighborhood of San Francisco with her husband and daughter.
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