Bryan R. Monte
AQ40 Summer 2024 Book Review
AE Hines, Adam in the Garden, CharlotteLit Press, 2024, ISBN 978-1-960558-07-7, 85 pages.
AE Hines second poetry collection, Adam in the Garden, is a real attention getter both inside and out. Its cover artwork, designed by Catrin Welz Stein, features a bare-chested, tattooed, sideshow strong man with a handlebar-moustache, standing in front of a velvet curtain, who has bent back the bars on his cage in a show of strength or possibly to escape. Hines in an email explained to me that ‘while the cover isn’t directly related to a single poem…I wanted an image that pushed back against the book’s title and something to contradict the religious archetypes and Biblical Eden to which some of the poem’s titles refer.’ In addition, Hines added that the images of the man’s tattoos, the prison bars, the strongman bending the bars, and the velvet curtains are repeated in his own poems about ‘love, escaping a repressive home, (and) breaking free from societal expectations’. Adam in the Garden’s cover art will certainly make you pick up the book. Its fine poems will keep you reading.
Adam in the Garden’s poems challenge, educate, and amuse. They tell the story of a gay man’s coming out, his escape from an abusive family, his search for gay experience and love, his desire to create his own family, and his development into middle-age. The book is divided into four sections. While each does not take place in a specific time frame, they do cover similar themes. Section One’s poems are about innocence and exploration. The first poem, ‘Astronauts’, is about two inexperienced young men who have sex in backyard during a high school sleep over on a blanket with the stars overhead. The beauty of their daring is reenforced by the natural beauty and outer space symbolism that surrounds them.
taking our time as fireflies
circled our naked bodies
like blinking satellites
or distant moons, each of us
edging closer
to discovery we could not
yet name.
The Biblical innocence-leading-to-banishment conceit is also reinforced with more recent moments from the poet’s life in ‘Breakfast in South America’, where he describes
A great blue-green birds follows me down
into the garden this morning…’
In this poem Hines also describes:
new roots raking through the dark earth
like God’s own fingers.’
There are other poems about Adam’s Biblical history which links his to the poet’s own. In ‘Adam Before Eve’, Hines contemplates what Adam’s life had been like before the Fall.
…before the weather
changed and leaves began to fall,
before Adam hid his dangling bits
and the down sprouting between his legs.
And a little bit later:
Did he notice the newborn sun
setting earlier each evening? Or
the damp smell of rot overtaking
his roses?
This poem then shifts dramatically in the next stanza referring to the poet’s present mentioning ‘parking lots // and condos. Strip malls and atom bombs.’ It provides a nice segue to the next poem, ‘Naturalization’, about the poet’s adoption of a Guatemalan baby and taking it through US Immigration at a Houston airport seated next to ‘brown men in shackles’. He regrets that in his moment of happiness ‘bouncing him (his baby boy) / on my lap, he ‘did nothing / Said nothing. / Didn’t catch / a man’s tired eye and offer / even a nod, a word / of my feeble Spanish.’ Another poem about gay fatherhood soon follows in ‘After the Adoption, where the poet mentions finding a moment of quiet and rest in the house while checking (the baby’s) bedding // for loose blankets and ill-placed toys’ reflecting soon after on to have ‘Found yourself awake on the edge // of so much happiness you fear fate / might intervene.’ Amen to that emotion, one that crosses many gay men’s minds every time they find themselves the recipient of some rare moment of happiness their parents’ might have told them they would never enjoy.
However, temptation appears in this section on innocence and exploration, in the poems ‘To My Flirtatious Friend Who Made a Pass at My Husband on Facebook’ and ‘The Fall’. The first is a testament to how to spot true love. The second is about the continuing psychological influence of parental abuse decades and thousands of kilometres away from the scene of the crime. In addition, ‘Sacramento, 1994’ ends this section and describes the pleasure of loud, good, adventurous sex.
Also in Section One, ‘Cervical Stenosis’, details one of the poet’s illnesses. Since writing my book, On the Level: Poems on Living with Multiple Sclerosis, I have become much more aware of rare medical conditions which affect poets’ lives. Hines describes with great detachment the surgery below his Adam’s apple (and thus another reference to his collection’s metaphorical conceit) during which he is unable to speak ‘when he shows me // his silver pick, the tiny hammer, how / he will chisel away the offending disc / and pop it out like a rusty coin // stuck in the slot of a jukebox.’ He makes the procedure more realistic by describing other environmental sounds like ‘music playing. … and / a woman is laughing,’. It’s very difficult to describe a procedure on oneself, so intricate and dangerous without being over emotional, but Hines describes it well. Another medical poem in Section 2 ‘Ocular Migrane’ describes his temporary blindness after sex and the MRI scans that enable doctors to make a diagnosis. (Another experience with which I familiar as I am losing my sight in my right eye due to my MS). However, in this poem, Hines finds humour in his situation by postulating: ‘my mind is overtaken with more joy / than it’s trained to handle.’ before concluding: Pressure / builds in spasms behind my eyes / and even in the dark I see I can’t see.’ Bravo!
Section Two includes poems of experience after Section One’s loss of innocence. It includes poems about natural, alcoholic, and pharmaceutical medications and addictions, medical and psychological problems and their treatments (What I’d Wished I Learned in Therapy), about a historical anti-LGBTI+ action, (‘The Night the Lights Went Out in Moore County, North Carolina’), parental denial of the harm caused (‘Family History’) a gay couple’s first anniversary, (‘Paper Anniversary’), and parallel to the structure of the first section, a poem which goes back in time to show Adam’s development as a gay man through sex (‘Security Deposit’). The most intriguing for me of these poems is ‘What I Wished I’d Learned in Therapy’ because of its its structure, rhythm, visual presentation, and prophetic voice. I consider it to be the finest poem in this collection. Its first lines are intimately and immediately engaging:
you will consider more than twice
smashing your own life
against the rocks once you discover it’s a boat
you keep sailing with the wrong bearing
no matter how many times you adjust the sails
It describes a gay man’s journey into the unknown with no guide or compass. ‘Family History’ mentions the poet’s mother’s false recollection of the poet leaving the family home. ‘She didn’t shove me out the door at sixteen’ but ‘I ran away’. ‘Paper Anniversary’ describes a gay couple’s first anniversary which the poet celebrates with his partner with the gift of two paper cranes which he gives to him ‘at the (kitchen) counter’ while he is ‘cutting / vegetables’ celebrating also their domesticity. ‘On Monogamy’ is a very important poem in this section on exploration describing some self-proscribed limits. We were six men by candlelight / discussing fidelity. ‘Monogamy is a fad, / someone suggested,’. The poet and his partner, somewhat unnerved by the direction the discussion seemed to be going, got out of the hot tub and went back to their kitchen to wash their dinner dishes, so that ‘As the men undressed and slipped into our jacuzzi, we passed dishes between us / the way we handled each other—gently / each chipped plate as precious as the last.’
Section Three takes this domesticity even further and begins with a poem about a next-door widow who complains about the ‘little things that piss her off’ about her husband’s death: ‘him/ not being there to make their bed together’ and not ‘passing her page / after page’ of the newspaper. ‘House of Spirits has to do with an ancient Andean culture’s customs and its belief in the supernatural which this poet confesses: ‘I no longer understand the mechanics / of belief. Or believe / our petitions are heard’. This one of a few poems set in South America in this section including ‘Winter in Colombia’, ‘Hummingbird’ and ‘Eden’ reflecting the poet’s residences in the USA and Colombia. It also includes a break up poem about the poet’s first long-term relationship, ‘I Give My Friend My Totem’, and a poem in memoriam of Matthew Shepard’s murder, ‘Postcard from the Dead’.
Section Four contains more poems of experience and a new love. It starts with another Adam poem, ‘Adam in Another Garden’. However, this garden is definitely no longer in Paradise. The poet observes that his new partner’s lettuce doesn’t seem to be growing as well as his own. When he discovers the cause, a ‘bunny (who) comes right up to him’ he quickly dispatches it with ‘a single / jagged stone from the top of the wall.’ And he compares himself to the Biblical Cain, ‘And though Abel has run off, // screaming for his mother, Cain sees it all.’ The next poem, ‘Incarnation’, describes how his father met, wed, and broke his young wife, the poet’s mother. In ‘Fibrillation’, the poet describes a ‘forty-four-year-old’ man ‘dropping to the cold gym floor’ from a sudden heart attack, who is kept breathing by a ‘panicked man’s’ mouth-to-mouth and revived by the EMT’s electronic shock. Another intimation of mortality in this section is ‘On a Beach by Little Sugar Creek’ The poet is sitting in a park, on one of several memorial benches. Here ‘A friend’s death reaches me / as I am staring at scrub trees’. The poet mourns his dead friend counting the extremity of the dead man’s loss: ‘Too young Too / everything two baby boys, a husband / who loved him.’ In ‘Red Eye Out of Atlanta’ poet describes how his new partner supports him by pulling him through Atlanta’s busy airport: ‘the way a slow barge might / be drawn through a narrow canal, tugged along / behind you through the slough of sleepwalking / bodies.’ It makes the poet feel ‘Safe’ and ‘happy / when you take my tired hand on our next flight…and close my eyes.’ The images of domesticity continue in ‘Signal Fire’ when the poet’s adult child answers his ‘gentle queries…with his one-word replies’ on his smartphone. The poet compares the phone to a ‘carrier pigeon (which) coos and teeters / in the soft flesh of my palm.’
There are also poems set in colder climes, such as in the US Northwest, where Hines studied creative writing. These include ‘a foot of new snow’ about dangerous winter traffic and a hospital test for a tumour which proves to be benign, ‘Aubade’, a tribute to Portland, and ‘Blizzard’ a poem about a snow and ice storm in which ‘cars slide // helplessly together like slapstick comedians.’ There is even a winter poem from the poet’s youth ‘Winter Memory’, his only happy childhood family memory in this book. They went out in the snow on 26 December ‘and waded in the shallow // eddies of a forest creek. It continues a bit later: ‘We held hands, one family / in those gentle swirls,…Such a rare/ silence—for a people who never knew peace.’ But the traces of that rare peace are erased by the frozen creek the next day, ‘the small ripples from our upturned toes / (were) carried off and lost downstream.’
The book ends with ‘Some Quiet Evenings’ and recollects, ‘Astronauts’, the first poem of this collection, in order to measure the distance the poet has travelled; the experience and the knowledge he has gained. Remembering that first night under the stars with a high school friend the poet asks ‘Who were we then? / Young and Swallowed / by the night. Unfinished. / Ill matched.’ The poet then comments on the passage of time since then.’ ‘The whole universe sliding away / a little more life / slipping out of me, again / so briefly in love.’ And he reflects on its meaning. ‘Some quiet evenings, I go out / to sit with them, all the men / I’ve been, and beneath / that same quilt of stars retrace / my path, the weak orbit / of every man to touch me.’ This poem completes the dramatic arc of this collection and it brought me to tears. I’m confident Adam in the Garden will also move you. AQ