The Spellbook of Fruit and Flowers, by Christine Butterworth McDermott, charms the reader with the language of plants to look at women’s lives, relationships, race, and history. The poems use fruits, herbs, and other vegetation as metaphors and objective correlatives for human situations, endowing the poetry collection with the magical power of an herbalist’s potion book.

On a trip to the Petrified Forest, after she witnesses her father’s abuse of her mother and her mother’s subsequent distress, the narrator reads a sign that says, “Only you can prevent forest fires. / / Only you. So you loved men who combusted, / spontaneously gave yourself to the flammable / . . . running outside to cover yourself with leaves, / his wood smoke skin can ash” (57).

In “The Sugared Plum,” the narrator ponders the imbalance of the sexual life between herself and someone else under the mistletoe: “How many presents have you / already unwrapped, how often / have your fingers folded back paper / / --or choked up girls with ribbon?”

The book is divided into three sections, with the center section one long poem entitled “Certain Bones, with Wisteria” about the discovery of Sally Hemings’ room at Monticello. The poem imagines the wisteria vines growing outside the house where Sally lived an imprisoned life in a windowless room next to Thomas Jefferson’s bedroom. Her accommodations were hidden in plain sight by being changed into a men’s bathroom in 1941.

Some wonder if a woman
loves the scent of wisteria,
if the room in which she stays
is still a prison.

Could Sally Hemings appreciate the beauty of her surroundings when she was not free? Wisteria has the power to cause damage to its surroundings, “it can bring the House down.” Wine and tea can be made from the flower, but its seeds are poisonous. Wisteria carries multiple meanings in this poem, but the overall impression is that wisteria, like slavery, can destroy the entity that houses it.

While The Spellbook of Fruit and Flowers does not hesitate before violence and trauma, in the manner of a healer’s manual, it seeks to better the human situation. In the last poem, “Texas February, with Yellow Flowers,” a “freak temperature drop” has killed plants and blossoms alike. But then the poem focuses on “the yellow of the kitchen / chairs, the lemon flowers on the dinnerware, / our faces turned like petals to the beams / of light.” It finishes, “In these winds, / / we bend rather than break, wintersweet.” Renewal and hope lie with the advent of metaphorical and actual springs. The Spellbook of Fruit and Flowers gathers fragments of a broken world and begins the process of repair.