Eric Beeny's Snowing Fireflies: A Review by Renee Emerson

Reading Eric Beeny’s  Snowing Fireflies is like entering a dream about childhood. Even the look of the chapbook is playful””meandering font, drawings of little fireflies here and there, a picnic basket on the cover. The stories are whimsical, imaginative, but with something dark lurking in the background, threatening to turn to nightmare at any moment.

The title story, ‘Snowing Fireflies,’ reminded me of a twist on the raining-frogs urban legend, setting the reader up for entry into the magical in the everyday:

It was beautiful, their small bodies falling across the hills, glowing embers like dead stars, shooting off constellations, broken like pearl necklaces made of Christmas lights–

The story seems to veer into the sentimental at the end:

I opened the curtains and you looked out the window, smiling big. We ran outside in our pajamas and lay down in the glowing field, more of them falling, covering us.

Then Beeny lets the sinister creep in:

We made snow angels, like in wet cement, laughing, sinking slowly, our whole bodies waving goodbye.

‘Snowing Fireflies’ sets a theme for the book—like Grimm’s fairytales, the stories are warm, domestic, and feature children, but a mysterious and frightening edge creeps into each of them. In  ‘The Umbrella Garden,’ an unnamed man spies on a woman watering her umbrellas:

…he watched her sitting on her porch, watched her watching shadows–water from his hose dripped off their webbed petals into the darkness he cultivated, nourishing the source from which is darkness opened, from which it bloomed for her.

The violence is perhaps most apparent in ‘Cloud.’ Told from a child’s perspective, the narrative is a mix of the child-like with hostility and pain—the kid goes down the slide on his “tummy” then is “punched in the face” by a bully and scratched by a girl. The poem ends with the child

down in the sand like a cigarette butt watching them float by, the shapes they made like things I could recognize: gauze, an x-ray chart of a lung with holes in it, a spotted wing.

There are times, when reading this chapbook, that the stories appear to be something someone would write for therapy–‘Cloud’ is one of the most marked moments.

There are 15 stories in the chapbook, some no longer than a few sentences, and it ends  with the longest and most character and dialogue filled story, “Staycation,” about a family camping out in their backyard. Like the rest of the narratives the event is domestic, everyday, and harmless. Even though the dad is the main character, child-like words like “wildernessy” pop up. The story ties back to the beginning of the book with the subtle mention of a dead pet, ‘Firefly,’ and it ends on a mysterious note, with the father stating that it “feels like we’re not even here.”

I was tempted to stop reading this chapbook when words like “pajamas,” “Christmas lights” and “snow-angels” were showing up close together in the first and title story; it was getting a little too cute for me. But I’m glad I didn’t stop, because that troubling, eerie edge of dark cars parked on the wrong side of the street and children being punched in the face anchored the daydreams with the nightmare.

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Renee Emerson writes poetry and lives at a seminary in Kentucky with her husband.