Reviewed by Tara Betts
After publishing her highly successful trilogy of prose about the subject of love, bell hooks attempts to decipher the ethereal utterances of love in her second poetry collection When Angels Speak of Love. In 1993, Harlem River Press released her first collection Woman’s Mourning Song, a thoughtful visitation of loss and how it compels women to transition into stronger, more experienced selves. In hooks’ first collection, there is “companions of the cave” a poem that could be perceived as a predecessor for these new poems in When Angels Speak of Love.
hooks offers 50 untitled spare poems with short, accessible lines identified by number, much like Emily Dickinson’s poems. Since she often talks about her search for clarity and simplicity through her writing to reach people who are not in academia, a poetry collection is not a surprising bridge to continue her reflections on love—romantic, familial, friends, self-love and in admiration of the wonders that can be experienced in the unpredictable dash of living.
Some of the evident inspirations include the Bible and fairy tale notions, especially when the images of angels and life-saving prince occur throughout the collection. hooks’ other muses are clearly the blues and the rural nature of the South where hooks was raised. For example, the blues and bearing witness in the Black church emerge in poem 22 that reads:
love ain’t got
no messenger
send death instead
love don’t need
no witness
let the spirit testify
‘cause it no matter
life or no life
strange heart of
familiar beat
whoever calling
they don’t know how to say my name. (43)
The connection between nature and the order of the heart in its scheme roots through a catalog of earth’s sweets in poem 10:
bluegrass waterfalls/lingering taste of
starch/naked earth clay/damp dark
digging/fishing worms wiggle/clear
moonshine/dandelion splendor/an
unending heat/small wonders …free
the heart/in deep red/this is love’s
memory/a poultice held next to flesh
and wound/a balm to soothe/all pain/
to press against hurt (19).
Poem 13 describes the speaker’s first love as “a backwoods man” who smells “of wild things and too long time/apart from the living.” He brings her “rabbit possum and coon/all strong meat/aphrodisiacs to stand/against the end of innocence (25).” This first love is earthy, even in his edibles that excite and urge the initiation into experience within a story that speaks like folk art that blacks in rural settings do not get to share or write down. Poem 13, as do many other poems in When Angels, talks about a change of seasons, not just in nature, but how humans move from one season of their lives to another.
One of the subtle surprises of When Angels Speak of Love is a sense of gender ambiguity. Sometimes, the pronouns deceive us or hooks omits the use of “he” and “she.” hooks even leads to the conclusion that some of the verse describes same-sex couples.
In poem 39, a writing chair is abandoned: “empty now/ the red chair/where I sit to write of love/no naked body easing down/opening hard/in this rocking of/our bodies/as we join/and move again/breast to breast… (77)” Of course, none of this jars readers out of the coherent theme of the book, it just includes what has always been the concept of a relationship for many. For hooks to bring such a combination of references together with heterosexual and homosexual relationships expands the idea of what can be discussed in love poems on equal terms. There should be delicate, simple poems that work for everyone. Other instances require specificity of who is loving who.
In any genre, hooks often seems to be talking through some pressing obsession that she is intrigued with at that time, and the scope of dialogue on the subjects she chooses is undoubtedly broadened by her writing on them. When Angels Speak of Love shares small bites of how love can be envisioned and experienced. In fact, it seems as if hooks is experiencing some sort of rebirth after her woman’s song of mourning to open herself to love in various manifestations.