‘I drink - and live - what has destroyed some men’
Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish once wrote in a poem, ‘A poem in a difficult time / is beautiful fl‘I drink - and live - what has destroyed some men’
Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish once wrote in a poem, ‘A poem in a difficult time / is beautiful flowers in a cemetery.’ Sometimes the words in a verse of grief—be it in a poem or a song—can also become like a pillow to cling to in grief of your own, a shared sorrow to embrace against the world, a sad beauty to get us through. The sonnets of Edna St. Vincent Millay are among such verses and here in her Collected Sonnets readers are given an incredible overview of her work and poetic dives into experiences of grief—‘always, with is awkward contours’— and growing older. There is a real beauty emanating from each sonnet even when it takes a hard gaze into the harshness of life as we are ‘remembering there is dying to be done’ but even amidst all that changes or fades there is still life to be lived and moments of serenity when ‘I shall find the sullen rocks and skies / Unchanged from what they were when I was young.’ A brilliant poet whom critic Harriet Monroe once called ‘the greatest woman poet since Sappho’ this volume of The Collected Sonnets is a wonderful window into the work of a writer with such an exquisite gift for examining memory and the morose while remaining beautiful in all the poetic reverberations.
Love is not all: it is not meat nor drink Nor slumber nor a roof against the rain; Nor yet a floating spar to men that sink And rise and sink and rise and sink again; Love can not fill the thickened lung with breath, Nor clean the blood, nor set the fractured bone; Yet many a man is making friends with death Even as I speak, for lack of love alone. It well may be that in a difficult hour, Pinned down by pain and moaning for release, Or nagged by want past resolution’s power, I might be driven to sell your love for peace, Or trade the memory of this night for food. It well may be. I do not think I would.
Edna St. Vincent Millay was a writer who was just as much a celebrity in her own life for being herself as she was for her works and her many public appearances and performances certainly helped grant her a lasting legacy. In Collected Sonnets we are given an overview of her artistic output across the years and grappling with the legacy of life looms large over the bulk of her poems, particularly with regard to love and loss. The two come intermingled in many of her poems, such as in When You, That At This Moment Are to Me, a personal favorite of mine:
When you, that at this moment are to me dearer than words on paper, shall depart, and be no more the warder of my heart, whereof again myself shall hold the key; and be no more-what now you seem to be- the sun, from which all excellences start in a round nimbus, nor a broken dart of moonlight, even, splintered on the sea; i shall remember only of this hour- and weep somewhat, as now you see me weep- the pathos of your love, that, like a flower, fearful of death yet amorous of sleep, droops for a moment and beholds, dismayed, the wind whereon its petals shall be laid.
The poem speaks to her overbearing awareness of impermanence in life, so much so that even in the first stages of love or happiness she is waiting for the other foot to fall that brings it all topping to ruin. She is ‘fearful of death, yet amorous of sleep,’ knowing that happiness tends to be followed by loss, and a ‘lover like a flower,’ will age, will wither, will die. Death lurks around every corner in her works. ‘Here I come to look for you, my love, / Even now, foolishly, knowing you are dead,’ she writes of love that lingers beyond the grave, yet still she often finds herself thwarted by uncertainty in such situations. ‘I don’t know what to do exactly when a person dies,’ she confesses and many of her poems rain down with grief like tears upon a face. ‘Weeping I wake; waking, I weep, I weep.’ Such is life.
Pity me not because the light of day At close of day no longer walks the sky; Pity me not for beauties passed away From field and thicket as the year goes by; Pity me not the waning of the moon, Nor that the ebbing tide goes out to sea, Nor that a man’s desire is hushed so soon, And you no longer look with love on me. This have I known always: Love is no more Than the wide blossom which the wind assails, Than the great tide that treads the shifting shore, Strewing fresh wreckage gathered in the gales: Pity me that the heart is slow to learn What the swift mind beholds at every turn.
Quite often these poems show her grappling with the harsh truth that everything will tarnish in time before fracturing and fading into oblivion. Alas, even love she says. ‘When Time and all his tricks have done their worst, / Still will I hold you dear,’ she wonders and it is a fear all of us must confront in life, wondering if the worst winds will blow a love off course or dash us upon the rocks of sorrow. Time chips away at us all and frequently she gorgeously embodies it in the spirit of seasons:
I cannot say what loves have come and gone, I only know that summer sang in me A little while, that in me sings no more.
I love the way her pristine prose captures all the waves of emotion that can crash through us within a single moment, often housing her poems in a rather gorgeous expression of time in miniature but with its doors blown open to unveil a vastness inside such as the space ‘until this cigarette has ended’ or the flash of a moment seeing the death notice of a former lover ‘Read from the back-page of a paper, say, / Held by a neighbor in a subway train.’ Each poem moves with such beauty and speaks so loudly of emotion and her voice is always crystal clear with strength, even in grief or remorse.
Well, I have lost you; and I lost you fairly; In my own way, and with my full consent. Say what you will, kings in a tumbrel rarely Went to their deaths more proud than this one went. Some nights of apprehension and hot weeping I will confess; but that's permitted me; Day dried my eyes; I was not one for keeping Rubbed in a cage a wing that would be free. If I had loved you less or played you slyly I might have held you for a summer more, But at the cost of words I value highly, And no such summer as the one before. Should I outlive this anguish--and men do-- I shall have only good to say of you.
Edna St. Vincent Millay once wrote ‘How first you knew me in a book I wrote, / How first you loved me for a written line,’ and so to do we readers come to embrace and enjoy her work. While I still might recommend her selected poems as a better starting point (I wrote about them here) to get a little more variety, The Collected Sonnets is as endearing as her work is enduring.
5/5
‘She had kept that kettle boiling all night long, for company.’...more
‘This is to poems that get lost in the dark’ --Jim Natal
What have you lost, poet Naomi Shihab Nye asks us in this anthology titled after the question. I‘This is to poems that get lost in the dark’ --Jim Natal
What have you lost, poet Naomi Shihab Nye asks us in this anthology titled after the question. It was a prompt she used that once turned an unruly classroom towards sharp focus and clarity she tells us in her introduction, a question that often brings about surprising answers with a vastness of variety it could fill the cosmos with all the absence we feel in our lives. What Have You Lost? is a lovely anthology that is as heartfelt as it is often heartbreaking, one I find myself taking down from the shelf quite often across the years I’ve owned it. I’m someone that bruises a bit from change, and while I’m always willing and accepting of it, quietly I feel it like a stormy sea tossing me about on existential waves as I try to recenter myself on the map and get my compass bearings straight. ‘Always is nice / to have, but it doesn’t / last long,’ writes poet Peter Heitkamp, and this is something I’ve felt deeply in life. Friends you knew intimately suddenly feel like a pleasant encounter at a train station far behind you, entire interpersonal work-cultures go from the top of your text messages to faded memories you aren’t sure where to put on your shelves once you are a job or two down the line, the funerals start stacking up, the places where you lived and loved are now only glimpsed in rare drive-bys with another person’s memories-in-the-making going on inside the windows, clothes you wore, tv shows you waited all week for the new episode, the person you were, even your own youth is eventually something now lost to the present. This collection brings some great poets such as the editor, Naomi Shihab Nye herself, together and includes some familiar names like Lucille Clifton, June Jordan, Nicanor Parra, Linda Gregg, Rolf Jacobson, and even Holland, Michigan’s (where I live) hometown hero Jack Ridl who just had a reading at my library last week. These poets are joined by many who were new to me and come from all over the world to look at the variety of ways we have lost something and, though gone from us, leaves a lasting (or even fleeting) mark upon our lives.
so many languages have fallen off of the edge of the world into the dragon’s mouth. some
where there be monsters whose teeth are sharp and sparkle with lost
people. lost poems. who among us can imagine ourselves unimagined? Who
among us can speak with so fragile tongue and remain proud?
‘The art of losing isn’t hard to master,’ wrote Elizabeth Bishop, though to this Naomi Shihab Nye adds that even so ‘we don’t necessarily find losing any easier to heal from or to comprehend.’ Because of that, this collection is a balm on our weary souls—or sometimes a finger poking the bruise—as we move through coping with loss. Because it comes in so many different varieties. Here we have poems that deal with loss of love, family like parents or children, poems of divorce, but also more abstract concepts like loss of culture, home, homelands or even language (as addressed in the above Clifton poem). Pat Mora discusses how we lose the childhood of our own children and they become teenages: ‘One day they disappear / into their rooms. / Doors and lips shut / and we become strangers / in our own home.’ Or there is Richard Beban tragically reflecting on ‘the day she stopped being / grandma and turned into / that madwoman.’ Though not all issues of loss here are painful or negative, such as Joy Harjo talking about losing one’s fears in I Give You Back:
I release you, my beautiful and terrible fear. I release you. You were my beloved and hated twin, but now, I don't know you as myself. I release you with all the pain I would know at the death of my children. You are not my blood anymore.
Sometimes we lose our old self but find new beginnings, ‘lost again, // where the world begins,’ as John Brandi writes in Wilderness Poem. Which is what makes this such a well-rounded anthology because for all the pain and sorrow, there is still hope and joy.
‘You’re free of something you didn’t know had a hold of you, like a ghost you’ve lived with and just found, the haunting over.’ --Robert Funge
When it comes to loss, I always feel literature and especially poetry is a perfect medium for addressing it. Music too. We are able to capture something now gone in words, something we can still find tangible in its abstractness within us. As Jay Bremeyer writes ‘Climb into / this story. / Be remembered!’ This reminds me of that Bright Eyes lyric about putting a painful breakup into ‘a song tied to a melody / and keep you there so you can’t bother me.’ Words are powerful, and the right arrangement of words won’t fill the void but, like the brightest of spotlights, helps you see the chasm, get a sense of the walls and depth, and make it less of a dark place. Thanks poetry, and thank you Naomi Shihab Nye for such a lovely anthology. I love how much heart went into this, especially the little bios of each poet that are so full of love, jokes, and goodwill towards each. This is a healing collection, I would heartily recommend it to everyone.
⅘
Oh and of course I need to show you all some Jack Ridl. He taught here at Hope College in the writing program, the one Emily Henry graduated from, and created a phenomenal Visiting Writers Series that has brought incredible poets to our little town. So shout-out to Jack Ridl.
Everything then was a comfort. The breeze we noticed was a small song, a single draw across the leaves.
We slept, held in cotton bags, wrapped in a fresh night. We lay and felt the stars were common; they were stars, wonderful--only stars.
Sometimes it can be a sparrow hopping on my front step. Another time, it can be a moment lost to memory. Another, a child walking. And then the hand....more
‘To know the ocean, I have always felt, is to recognize the teeth it keeps half-hidden.’
When Florence Welch recommends a book, I have to read it. This‘To know the ocean, I have always felt, is to recognize the teeth it keeps half-hidden.’
When Florence Welch recommends a book, I have to read it. This is just how things work. And this is how I spent my vacation travel time with a slow-burn, haunting and heartbreaking work that examines loss within the framework of horror, something most would probably not recommend as relaxation reading but for me it was infectiously perfect. Our Wives Under the Sea by Julia Armfield is a quiet earthquake, slowly rearranging your emotions through ever-growing tension and terror while simultaneously being incredibly tender. On the surface this is a horror novel, rocking on the waves of perspectives between married couple Miri and Leah as they tell of Leah’s traumatic submarine accident that has left her slowly transforming from the person she once was in a series of ghastly and chilling scenes. Most of the novel, however, recounts their relationship in contrast with the nearly-absent Leah of the present and the now-caregiver Miri who is at her wits end. ‘The thing about losing someone isn’t the loss but the absence of afterward,’ Leah is told, and Armfield dives beneath the waves of loss to explore the void of absence and, at its heart, this novel is a moving meditation on grief and what it means to love a person. Armfield manages to make Our Wives Under the Sea a novel in which you will find yourself both shivering and sobbing as it slowly pulls you under into its shadowy depths.
‘The deep sea is a haunted house, a place in which things that ought not to exist move about in the darkness.’
While I found this novel to be incredibly provocative and enjoyable, I suspect it will appeal mostly to a niche audience. It is less a horror novel and more an emotional interrogation set in a horror setting, blended to taste with a preference for the flavors of grief. Luckily, this is the sort of genre-experimentation I truly crave and for me the lack of much actually happening only seemed to heighten the tension of what was going on underneath. Armfield executes it all in gorgeous prose that is as unnerving as it is often rather romantic.
‘Every couple, I think, enjoys its own mythology,’ Miri reflects, ‘recollections like note cards to guide you around an exhibition.’ The novel is set upon Leah’s return after half a year’s absence stuck in a sunken submarine and much of the time is spent looking back on the Leah of the past now that present self seems a disintegrating shell devoid of the Leah she once knew. We are treated to reminicents of their story together, the sort of memories that become bathed in the light of golden era nostalgia and tell the narrative of a couple. It’s this museum of memories that makes the absence much more pronounced after a break-up or death, for instance. However, Armfield asks us if ‘we cry for ourselves without the person we have lost far more than we cry for the person,’ sort of like how in an on-again-off-again relationship the memories tease us back into thinking it can work before the reality of a person beyond the cherry-picked memories reminds us why it didn’t in the first place. The book seems like scattered vignettes, but that is precisely the effect Armfield hopes to convey:
’It’s easier, I think, to consider the fact of us in its many disparate pieces, as opposed to one vast and intractable thing. Easier, I think, to claw through the scatter of us in the hopes of retrieving something, of pulling some singular thing from the debris and holding it up to the light. So, in pieces, then: a long time ago, we met.’
It is a really beautiful endeavor, seen in this light, with the novel being a prolonged terror plunging towards loss backlit by a montague of endearing memories. In effect it also examines how difficult it is to truly convey the impression of a romantic interest to someone not seeing them through your eyes:
‘I want to explain her in a way that would make you love her, but the problem with this is that loving is something we all do alone and through different sets of eyes. It’s nearly impossible, at least in my experience, to listen to someone telling a story about a partner and not wish they’d get to the point a little faster…It’s easy to understand why someone might love a person but far more difficult to push yourself down into that understanding, to pull it up to your chin like bedclothes and feel it settling around you as something true.’
It’s passages like this that really drove this book deep into my heart and made me care for these characters. As well as adorable passages of their early love and learning each other. ‘When I returned to this story later, I would superimpose an eighteen-year-old me over the top of the girlfriend, scribbling her out and sketching my lines in more permanent ink,’ Miri confesses in a cute section about Leah’s teenage past working in an aquarium.
Amidst all the horrors and Leah’s slow-burn retelling of what occurred beneath the ocean—brief passages that descend into a fever pitch of confusion and trauma—Armfield delivers a really moving portrait of relationships in general, being sincere, humorous, and often critical. I gasped at the mention of how Miri was relieved that a married couple they become couple-friends with was able to be funny without relying on their jokes being insults of their partner, which is a very spot on observation. Armfield also depicts a loving queer relationship that addresses the realistic aspects of being a woman in a patriarchal world, though the focus is on their love and coming together and not facing homophobia, which is nice to be able to read about the couple thriving instead of battling against society. The horrors here are something else, something lurking in the deep.
The loss of Leah, even when she is still here, is juxtaposed with Miri’s loss of her mother to a degenerative disease, showing the two situations as similar but more for the effect of highlighting their individualities. There is a motif of degeneration in this novel, such as Miri’s friend having her eyesight declining, and we are reminded that for as much love as our bodies can contain, they cannot forever remain. Loss is inevitable, and therefore coping is necessary. ‘My heart is a thin thing, these days,’ Miri tells us, ‘shred of paper blown between the spaces in my ribs.’ The grief is disintegrating her as well, like an infectious symptom.
A stand-out portion of the novel involves Miri, during her months of not knowing where Leah is, discovering an online group that playacts as a support group for people with husbands that have vanished into space on long voyages. Armfield even creates an in-group set of terms and abbreviations (MTM: mission to mars, for example) that show the lengths people will go to examine the feeling of loss and lack, even when the lack is invented. It reminds us that this is a universal feeling, but one we often keep out of the public eye or even hide from our friends as if it is shameful. The healing, it seems, comes when we share grief together.
One thing that really struck me is how well researched this book is. The ocean facts prop the book up nicely and there is such care to keep the language centered on the idea of diving beneath the waves. Even the characters depressive thoughts are referred to as ‘sunken thoughts.’ The ocean is a scary place in Armfield’s hands, a place she reminds us we know less about than the surface of the moon. The novel is even separated into sections titled after depths of the ocean. In an interview with Them magazine, Armfield discusses why the ocean is such a perfect setting for this queer romance/horror, being ‘as a symbol of something forbidden,’ that functions as ‘a very natural setting for coming-out narratives.’ The ocean itself comes alive like a character here, full of dread and mystery.
‘I think it also has something to do with the fact that the sea can be many things at once. It can be very calm on the surface, and something can be going on underneath. That speaks to the way that we as queer people have to be so many different things to so many different people: to our parents, at work, to society, to our partners, et cetera. It’s a really useful tool in queer storytelling, which is why people return to it.’
Armfield has taken great care for this to come across in the novel, and I certainly will never look at a body of water the same. It is both the metaphor and the monster here.
‘Miri said this to me once: Every horror movie ends the way you know it will.’ Without spoiling anything, this novel heads on a trajectory and satisfyingly stays its course. The book feels like a combination of Annihilation and a more-successful version of the final episode to The Haunting of Bly Manor, being more interested in the horrors of it’s themes than needing to satisfy a purely plot-driven conclusion. I would argue it does both, but I prefer quiet novels like this. There is so much intrigue going on in small doses that really keep you flipping pages, from the bizarre effects on Leah’s body, the mysterious Center she works for, and by leaving everything fairly vague and mysterious throughout the novel, Armfield allows the horror to seep into our thoughts and make us question our own interpretations. Scary, sweet and sinister, Our Wives Under the Sea is a brilliant examination of loss and a story that will haunt me for a long time. Come for the creepy, stay for the crying.
5/5
‘When I was younger, I think some glib or cavalier part of me always believed that there was no such thing as heartache - that it was simply a case of things getting in past the ribcage and finding there was no way out. I know now, of course, that this was a stupid thing to think, in so far as most things we believe will turn out to be ridiculous in the end.’...more
We will grow old with the world, you and I, and the earth will be our skeleton.
I want to love writes poet John Rybicki, until we are old.. At the age ofWe will grow old with the world, you and I, and the earth will be our skeleton.
I want to love writes poet John Rybicki, until we are old.. At the age of 29, Julie Mold—poet and wife to Rybicki—was diagnosed with cancer and passed 16 years later after a long battle fraught with relapses and transplants. When All the World is Old by Rybicki chronicles a tale of limitless love and loss, and the devastated wilderness of the aftermath. These poems are pointblank and often embody the feeling of being the unlit side at the bottom of a dried up well. They stare right into your heart and you are made to react by uncovering the hidden recesses of self only tapped by extreme emotional pain, the sort of pain that sears into a realm of reality seemingly through and beyond our own waking life, call it whatever you will. Or, perhaps, it is that our pain has burned a whole in the pages of reality through which we have slipped and stare at the world from the outside, feeling like a plane crash victim rejoining consciousness stranded in a broiling, endless desert with a void instead of sky overhead.When All the World is Old is a glowing elegy to a lost love and also the necessary outpour of sadness leading towards a healthy recovery,
If If I could tie a river around my love’s waist like ribbon, make sails out of her blood and pin down death like a squirming bug.
If I could lift and rock each coffin in my arms I would start with hers.
This is a very powerful collection written in times of near-implosive sorrow. The prose is often times sharp steel that strikes right to the core, yet at times also descends upon the reader like a rush of ungraspable air in numbed landscapes of weightless beauty. The poet—whose earlier collection Traveling at High Speeds, dealing primarily with his hometown of Detroit, Michigan, is another worthwhile investigation—has a gift for probing your most tender regions without tumbling into feeling forced or twee or any other nauseous sentimentality. This isn't one of those books that constantly look up from the page to see if it has made you cry yet, capitalizing on emotion to pull an effect; this book is not dredging up emotion but simply is emotion pure and true. They are delicate and bruised, yet strong and empowered. They are a beautiful reflection on a lost life and an investigation into the poetry sweat out by pain. Most of the poems do address the situation directly, yet there are many that look outwards into life but bear the loss in their tone. Each poem somehow builds it’s monuments of prose on a dry landscape of love and loss.
(from The Noise From my Fingers) Maybe time itself came brushing the trail behind me until it vanished
clean off the grass, and I took up residence with all the other balloons floating along the landscape.
This is a collection for all who have ever loved and lost, yet the power is not lost on any reader not currently in such a state as he probes a universal emotional trigger. It is a difficult collection to read beyond a poem or two at a time, because it soaks you in such melancholy even when the poems stretch into optimism. Still, it is a wonderful collection and sure to break your heart.
4/5
I’m Only Sleeping Another six-pack in the tub floating downstream next to my bed.
I fall asleep with the light on and a beer in hand. It tips over so I wake up in what
feels like my own piss. My Jack Russell’s drowsing two feet higher at the foot of the bed.
He’s there with all those clothes heaped up and layered over Julie’s hospital things: her bathrobe, diapers, and soft bottoms;
lotion for rubber her face and bald head. Let go now, Johnny. The moon is writing
sweeter sentences on the water that you anyway. Pull the earth over you now and sleep.
Those last few lines are devastating(ly good)....more
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