The Ministry of Flowers by Andrea Witzke Slot

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Ministry of Flowers by Andrea Witzke Slot Phill Provance (bio) the ministry of flowers Andrea Witzke Slot Valley Press https://www.valleypressuk.com/book/146/the_ministry_of_flowers 104 pages; Print, $12.52 What does it mean to be human in an uncaring world? For me, one answer has come in the form of Andrea Witzke Slot's latest collection, The Ministry of Flowers, which evinces an awareness singularly apt for our times. It is, however, not a collection intent upon pat answers, reciprocating the world's mysteries with mystery in kind. In other words, it is a book that achieves the difficult ends of inspiring childlike wonderment in adults by reintroducing us to the world—as if, for want of a more recent analogy, her speakers are the characters of Lewis Padgett's classic short story "Mimsy Were the Borogoves," attempting to teach us how to rethink our common reality in non-Euclidian terms. Thus, Slot refreshes our perspective, showing us newly discovered aspects of our surroundings we previously failed to notice, and consequently conveying a hint of salvation through her work. Perhaps the most obvious expression of this is felt in Slot's employing a wide variety of forms. If, per Raymond Williams's seminal Marxism and Literature (1977), "There is a … tendency in the analysis of art to look … [for] fully articulate and systematic expressions of … ideology in the content (base-superstructure) or form (homology) of actual works," what we encounter in The Ministry of Flowers is a mind willing to give a wide variety of ideologies a fair hearing. For Slot's is a creative consciousness ostensibly as comfortable with couplets as with prose poetry, with the long, short, and dropped line alike. As a result, at times we confront entirely filled pages, while at others our eyes alight on utter minimalism. And yet, from Slot this seems less an intention to exhibit poetic prowess as to establish an overarching sense of ebb and flow. Surely this is by design, and yet, though readily apparent, it augments, rather than detracts from, the collection's content—which provides these forms an equally powerful and cohesive counterweight. For instance, beginning with the collection's title, we [End Page 144] are deeply anchored in tradition with an allusion to Dickinson's "Between My Country—and the Others": Between My Country—and the Others—There is a Sea—But Flowers—negotiate between us—As Ministry. In other words, from the reader's very first glance, The Ministry of Flowers announces its primary themes of connectivity, framework, and communication, for doesn't a ministry inherently entail attending to place and others? Clearly, this is why the collection begins with the prose poem "Panoply": Some days the rigid silhouette of all we are is revealed in plates of glass. Some days we might touch the strange mesh of armor that keeps us upright and steady and wonder at how little keeps us from flopping into heaps on the floor like the billowing collapse of a circus tent as stakes are pulled from the ground. One may wonder, of course, whether we can trust this first poem as indicative of the collection's overall theme and mood, but reading on, we realize that what it establishes is the assumption of human fragility underpinning the themes of its sequels. Subsequently, vulnerability looms large—and not just that of humanity but of the world around us: the environment, our fellow creatures, the newborn in an incubator as well as the truck driver awaiting a shower at a truckstop. Consequently, the collection seems to interrogate the universe as to the ontological necessity for this state of affairs; why exactly, we might imagine the poems' speakers asking, must we endure universal vulnerability—and, granting that we must, how do we do so? Certainly, if we are to concur with Slot's own assertion that "there are two kinds of poets" we might infer from the collection's thrust that these two types comprise those who make statements and those who ask questions, classing Slot among the latter. And yet, the correlative question then becomes what answers The Ministry of Flowers might offer, whether these answers seem...