In the poem ‘Mad for it’, a feminist perspective is also applied to the myth of the baby Zeus and the nymph Melissa, who kept him alive by feeding him the honey gifted to her by bees, but kept the source a secret. Vickery links this to the competition that mars women’s closeness in contemporary society:

…she stored knowledge close to her breast,
unaware that modesty rears its own monsters.
What women won’t share shatters the sisterhood.

There is an emphasis on the need for community, which is characteristic of how bees live, yet not the stuff of legend. It’s the antithesis to the popular cross-cultural myth of the hero’s journey, yet necessary for the survival of our planet: ‘collectivism force-fed as necessity, nurture’s anti-heroic twist.’

This call for collective heroics leads cleverly into ‘Squad Assembly’, where Vickery combines these mythological conceits with pop culture behemoths such as Marvel’s Avengers in order to address ecocritical concerns that require collectivist action. In this case, the threats to humanity are not hostile aliens or Hydra, Marvel’s insidious Nazi antagonists, but dangerous weather patterns caused by climate change and the leaders who enable it (‘Insidious threat/containment … attempted hydra uprisings’). Vickery’s analogy becomes urgently visible:

As firestorms rage both on and off screen, who wields
Thor’s hammer now? In the bid to counter despair
with hope, campaign for more than superhero mechanics …

She addresses the horrific bushfires of 2019, which unfortunately neither classical heroes nor their comic book counterparts could realistically counter; Thor’s hammer, for example, generates electricity and would technically worsen a fire. Instead of longing for these ‘superhero mechanics’, as indicated by Marvel’s unprecedented success at the box office, Vickery suggests that this mass audience could ‘join a growing chorus across nations and become ipso facto unbound’, as Greta Thunberg’s activism has proven. The piece then turns into a feminist call to arms, or an alternative squad assembly, by way of unpopular female antiheroes such as Medusa and the Gorgons, now reclaimed as feminist activists:

…smash a double down logic, undo the expectation/to smile and accommodate…be, as then, Medusa’s girl gang, consummate.

The poem triumphs in its subversion of normative structures, like so many others in the collection, and in this case that of male heroic tales, by way of these postmodernist and feminist interventions. This includes her non-hierarchical amalgamating of the so-called ‘lowbrow’ with the ‘highbrow’ in a call for collective unity. Vickery once wrote that the poets ‘Harford and Niedecker were familiar with avant-garde, high cultural practices … yet both would turn to vernacular forms … to explore everyday life as sedimentary layers of various pasts and the present’. This is also true of her work, which includes as one of its layers a Marxist challenging of class divisions in art; she astutely illustrates the theorist Andreas Hyssen’s observation that ‘the most significant trends within postmodernism have challenged modernism’s relentless hostility to mass culture’.

In a similar way, ‘Major Tom visits Dagworth Station’ contrasts the folk hero from Slim Dusty’s rendition of ‘Waltzing Matilda’ with David Bowie’s more cerebral astronaut (‘Space Oddity’, ‘Ashes to Ashes’), as the poem responds to the slightly absurd decision to make ‘Waltzing Matilda’ the first song to be broadcast from space. Utilising surrealist imagery, Vickery evokes Slim’s literal groundedness, underscoring the disconnect between a bush-bound life and the weightless grandiosity of space travel. However, while Major Tom seems to be more suited for a space broadcast, Vickery implies that perhaps the choice was understandable after all, given the epic history of the love song (‘we chose … an ode to my darling’). There are some exquisite turns of phrase here, as the folk song’s protagonist is wittily referred to as a ‘eucalypt delusional’, and Slim’s home becomes a ‘landscape tragic with horses’. The lines are emblematic of Vickery’s dexterous poetics, in combining the vivid imagery of lyric poetry with the semantic intricacies of the experimental form. Other contemporary Australian poets who are skilled at this include Toby Fitch and Jessica L. Wilkinson, among others, continually proving that powerful poetry doesn’t have to be either/or.

This is not to say that Vickery doesn’t deftly shape-shift from one mode to another; ‘Propagation’, for example, definitively chooses the lyric form in order to evoke a striking analogy between bees and Venetian glassmakers:

Bees see colour quicker, pinpoint a petals’ iridescence …
Glassmakers, too, perceive each singular stone, not
the swirling mosaic that speaks of larger things.

As well as an appreciation for Vickery’s figurative and semantic richness, and her postmodernist melding, no one could come away from this collection without feeling some kinship with bees, as well as a heightened awareness of colony collapse issues of our own. Remarkably, when bees consider their hive to be diseased, they will ‘swarm’ and move away from it, risking the elements in order to build a new society. Perhaps we need to take similar action regarding our own metaphorical hives, in favour of ones that are not reliant upon environmental destruction for profit, under the guise of support for workers; as the sociologist Richie Nimmo has observed, ‘bees have increasingly come to stand for the damage that late capitalism and industrialised agriculture is wreaking upon the ecosystem’, and Vickery’s collection both critically examines and poetically renders this symbolic act. ‘This is the time of hanging on for the bees,’ Plath notes soberly in ‘Wintering’; more than fifty years later, Vickery seems to add, in her own end poem ‘Bee-cause’: ‘because colony collapse is a domino disorder, no cause is left but the most ancient of all: the struggle to fly’.

These lines may not be a specific reference to the Plath poem, but they could easily be a response to it. ‘Wintering’ ends with the anticipation for renewal that both Plath and the bees seem to share, and it is the onset of the flowering season that stirs the bees into flight. In Vickery’s end line, however, bees struggle to fly at all. The poems in this collection doesn’t ask how culpable we are; instead, in examining all the ways in which we already are, they ask how we can remedy, if reversal is no longer an option. One possible answer is to become more bee-like; that is, to give up the individualist, profit-based practices that have led us here, and to make room for more regenerative, collectivist ones. This can include change on a grassroots level, such as creating bee-friendly gardens and reducing pesticides, to change on a wider scale, such as the decarbonising of economies. Vickery’s eloquent and compelling collection is a good place to start, for believers and antagonists alike.