The HIVE: Is a Book We Read For its Honey

Poetry. "Gerry Grubbs is an apiarist of the ineffable, of that which is at once of bodily evanescence, yet eternal: that is to say, he is a keeper of Rilke's invisible hive. In preamble to his new book of poems, THE HIVE: IS A BOOK WE READ FOR ITS HONEY, he quotes Rilke's famous lines, 'We are the bees of the invisible. We wildly collect the honey of the visible, to store it in the great golden hive of the invisible.' An act of transformation where 'our task is to take this earth so deeply and wholly into ourselves that it will resurrect within our being.' The poems in Gerry Grubbs' book are like the bees themselves: discrete entities, yet everywhere universal, quietly going about the miracle that is the sustain of being. For as Thoreau reminded us of the extraordinary in the every day of the ordinary, 'We live in a world where there are flowers,' where between the bee and the flower is a remarkable, gentle and mysterious alchemy at transformative work. So, too, there is in Gerry Grubbs' poems that which goes on between the reader and the flower of his words: the active build of the hive of language where the invisible honey is stored. Where we are in apprehension and appreciation of that quotidian which is as much the numinous."—Robert Murphy