The Invention of Honey

Bob Lincoln is Director of Acquisitions at the University of Manitoba
Libraries.

These are imaginative, introspective, and delightful poems. They do not
follow any contemporary school or style, but they are crafted out of a
sensibility that is intellectual and sensual, yet often detached and
speculative. Sternberg’s poems are also written as “little
stories,” in a manner that is more European or Latin than North
American, more mythical than literal. These are poems with the same
flights of fancy Saint-Exupéry demonstrates in The Little Prince.

An unusual character in one poem is Mump, which serves as an alter ego
and a handy creature for a writer’s burdens. In the title poem, “The
Invention of Honey,” Sternberg tells us what we don’t know about
bees. He also writes dialogues of lovers, angels, onions, and his
grandmother. Sternberg can create a poem—effortlessly, it seems—just
by using the title “Buffalo.”

The poems in the first section only hint at what follows. There is a
poem that includes his father, old men, a Latvian immigrant, and a
resculpting of images from Psalm 203. Another poem describes the route
of a drunken poet going home, and his confrontations. There is another
poem catching Erasmus in the kitchen, making tea. Lovers get equal
treatment: Sternberg analyzes how they exchange gifts, and how they
posture for love. In many ways these are ordinary, even pedestrian,
events, given wings and a second dimension by Sternberg’s clear style
and unobtrusive diction.

There is an affectionate, loving remembrance of a maiden aunt, as well
as “Crooked Sonnets.” The poem “A Note to Fat Frogs” could be
seen as an extension of La Fontaine’s Fables, or it could be read as a
warning to politicians, much like Robert Frost’s in “Provide,
Provide.”

The messages in these poems have nothing to do with bees or honey, but
they have everything to do with the spirit of life.