Review: Homing

Setting is a Literary Weapon
Review: Homing

Samantha Szumloz

Alison Hicks 
Sheila-Na-Gig Editions pp. 96 
Cost: $16.00 

The past can fill the soul with sweet nostalgia, but it can also fill the mind with memories it would rather forget. Alison Hicks’ latest poetry collection, Homing, is a treasure trove of recollections brimming with the brightness of childhood, the solitude of being an outsider, and the beauty of creation in all forms. Through natural and man-made environmental themes, Hicks soars across planes of joy, loneliness, and womanhood by constructing scenes that not only help readers ponder the mysteries of our habitats, but also the mysteries within ourselves. 

Hicks, a past Glassworks contributor, is no stranger to poetry, as Homing is her fourth published collection. She has dedicated her book to her husband and son, respectfully called “the archivist and the naturalist.” This attribution is a perfect transition into her body of work, which deals with the natural world, our man-made world, and their connections to our lives.

Hicks’ style is a blend of free verse poetry that combines concepts like nature’s bounty with dreamy-like reminiscence, fabricating a pipeline that takes readers through the simple, yet counterintuitively complex, beginnings of a writer. In her poem “Gifts of the Mediterranean,” she writes about a childhood beach vacation, recalling her parents’ words about Poseidon’s wrath and Athena’s generosity, correlating their characters with the raging sea and the olive tree:

Poseidon struck a rock with his trident and water came out.
Athena planted an olive branch.
Her gift deemed the more valuable.
Maybe one reason Poseidon was always getting angry. (13-16)

The notion of Poseidon’s chaos and rage foreshadows what is to come in the following poem. In “Euston Station, 1965,” Hicks tells of her father’s departure to Dublin through verse: 

The glare stays in my eyes when I look down:
my hand in my mother's flow of travelers around us.
The train waits, a stretched-out animal, painting, curving out of sight.
My father is going to Dublin (2-6)

The poet’s method of storytelling through verse is extraordinary, pulling from monstrosities and mythologies to get her childhood fears across.   

Hicks is a goddess at utilizing tangible, familiar environments (and objects) in her writing to amplify profound thoughts and states of being. This aspect of her poetry shines in her second poem, “The Party,” which puts our everchanging identities in conversation with the identities that people think we embrace. She writes:

No mystery we are a mystery to ourselves,
bottle we cannot drink from, only pour for others,
track the play of florals, musk, and fruit
​in animation of faces and voices (1-4)

Her way of lacing situation with metaphor creates an atmosphere that goes beyond the written page, a feeling of the self that turns self-reflection into an external process, turning her words into nuggets of understanding that readers can cling to.

Not only are Hicks’ words gorgeously human, but they are also deeply relatable. Homing is an exploration of the self, of childhood events and how they connect to our present states of mind. It is a journey that twists and turns through like life. As Hicks states in “Place of Seasons,” “I’ve stretched my body out on the Canadian Shield. / I’ve lost the trail many times, then found it,/ or maybe another one” (lines 13-15). We lose and find our own trails, time and time again, through the art we express.