‘The Poet and the Bees: A Story of the Seasons Sylvia Plath Kept Bees’
By Amy Novesky
Illustrations by Jessica Love
Viking, 32 Pages

Sylvia Plath loved to draw, write poems, keep bees, and tend to her two children. That a poet has now brought together all elements of the writer’s life in a book for young readers that celebrates both the delicacy and the determination of Plath’s brief life is cause for considerable reflection and elation.

The first poem, “Love, my season,” begins: “bees don’t live long / Alive for a bright, quick moment, then gone,” and concludes: “But honey lives forever. Words too.” The poem speaks to the nature of existence even as it recalls for older readers a creative life cut short and yet so fulfilling.

“To meet the bees, the poet arrives / in a sleeveless dress, no less.” Not beekeeping gear and equipment — not yet, but with a sense of how the poet is at one with these creatures, captured in that one word “meet.”

Of course she dons the regalia of beekeeping, “hat and suit” to encounter a hive humming “like a panicked heart.” So much has been written about Plath’s own pathology that to read about her among the bees who feel the same way is to alter our perspective, bringing us down to the ground with the children this book is written for.

What the bees do is offer a sense of purpose: “They come and go / They seem to know exactly what to do.” One of Jessica Love’s illustrations shows Plath sitting down on the earth, her head canted to the right and upward, as though listening to the life she has chosen to cultivate.

Plath’s biography enters the book more directly in “Summer”: “In the blue hour, her hour,/ the poet writes / until the babies wake / just past dawn / She writes like mad.”  This is all part of a cycle: “Babies and bees / rise with the sun.”

The poems present the details of beekeeping simply as Plath smokes out the hive, the “bees buzz about her in an electric cloud / Her heart buzzes too.” The next line is about beekeeping, how careful she has to be to get it right without crushing the bees: “It could all go wrong” — a line that can refer to the keeping of bees as well as to the keeping of a life or a poem.

Why bees? Later it is explained that her father was an expert about bees, but for the poet, no scientist, the bees are at one with the pain and pleasure of life itself: “She is covered in stings. / She feels all she feels, which is a lot” — a phrase that a child might speak.

In the golden season of fall, everything glows “as if from within … The poet can glow and burn / as if lit from within too.” Ms. Love pictures Plath writing in her journal with a swarm of bees seeming to fly right out of her hair in a beautiful representation of how Plath illuminated her own world and ours.

Into the swarm Plath goes: “It’s like being inside her own panicky heart,” but “not as scary as she thought it’d be. / It is thrilling.” Plath feels as though she is flying. The exhilaration of the poet and the person has never been better represented than in Ms. Novesky’s poems and Ms. Love’s illustrations.

As Plath gazes at her jars of honey, very much like the poems she has stored up for the winter, she looks forward to her London flat, painting the walls the color of “morning blue,” as she finishes her book, putting the poems “in order.” 

Plath nurtured her bees as she nurtured her poetry and her children. The first and last words of “The Poet and the Bees” are love and spring, which are the last words in Plath’s great book of poetry, “Ariel.” Although she did not make it to another spring, her book did.

Plath still calls to us, still looks forward. In a final prose section, “About Sylvia Plath,” Ms. Novesky concludes: “Despite the deep pain she endured in her short life, she appeared to have hoped in the season to come.” That season, of course, is ours.

Mr. Rollyson is the author of “American Isis: The Life and Art of Sylvia Plath”; “The Last Days of Sylvia Plath”; “Sylvia Plath Day by Day”; “The Making of Sylvia Plath,” and the forthcoming “Searching for Sylvia.”