Book of the Week – dogwood & honeysuckle by John Martone

What does it mean for a book to become a place?

It describes a landscape, and then asks the reader to inhabit it, to walk its paths repeatedly until the smallest details begin to matter. John Martone’s dogwood & honeysuckle is one such book. It is a sequence of poems that is a sustained practice of attention, where gardens, woodland paths, potted plants, birds’ nests, Buddhist thought, and memory slowly become part of the same lived landscape.

Martone, an American poet whose work has long drawn upon Zen Buddhism, natural history, and minimalist aesthetics, has created something that resists hurried reading. The collection gathers dozens of small themed sequences that move between haiku, monoku, prose, and visual arrangement. White space is not decorative here. It becomes part of the act of seeing.

One of the earliest poems offers an invitation into the book’s way of looking:

stump hole—
bottomless
pond now! (p. 17)

The transformation happens almost instantly. What was once absence becomes fullness. Martone repeatedly reminds us that perception depends less on what is present than on how we choose to look.

The poems often reward extraordinary patience. Consider this delicate observation:

wipe sweat
from
my eyes—count
a
dragonfly’s
spots (p. 22)

The impulse is wonderfully human. Instead of brushing past the dragonfly, the speaker pauses long enough to count its markings. The poem celebrates attention as an act of devotion.

Throughout the collection, birds’ nests become recurring images. One of the most memorable appearances is here:

fall’s
perfect
nest
but
gloxinia
buds’
hatchling
beaks (p. 46)

Martone delights in correspondence. Flower buds become waiting birds, while the nest itself seems ready to breathe again. 

The haibun sections open another dimension of the book. In Generations, Martone reflects on childhood, memory, and home before arriving at this brief poem:

uphill
set back
from road
one last
cape cod
&
row
boat (p. 124)

The spare lines carry the emotional weight of the prose preceding them. Landscape becomes autobiography. The house is both a physical place and a remembered life.

Near the close of the collection comes a poem that captures Martone’s larger philosophy:

winter’s
end
comes
lady
bug
from
under
bed
onto
my
finger (p. 189)

The moment is almost childlike in its delight. After pages devoted to seeds, moss, leaves, insects, stones, and gardens, the appearance of a single ladybug feels entirely earned. Renewal arrives through a single ladybug.

One of the pleasures of dogwood & honeysuckle is that it asks us to slow our reading. The poems are pauses in time themselves. Their unusual spacing encourages the eye to linger, making us aware of breath, movement, and the physical shape of language on the page.

As you read, notice how often Martone returns to the same objects. A bird’s nest, a clay pot, a path, a seed, a window. Do they remain the same each time, or have they changed because your attention has changed?

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You can read the entire collection in the THF Digital Library.

The THF Digital Library can now also be found easily through the carousel on the home page, making it even easier to discover books, journals, and other treasures from the archive.

Do you have a full-length or chapbook-length book published in 2021 or earlier that you would like featured as a Book of the Week? Contact us for details. Book of the Week selections are made by THF Digital Librarian Vidya Premkumar and are featured with permission.