The Art of Losing: Poems of Grief and Healing, edited by Kevin Young

A friend recently asked if I could suggest a poem she might read at a memorial service for her grandmother. I love those kinds of requests, that set off mini research projects. And this one was made relatively easy because I’d recently bought The Art of Losing: Poems of Grief and Healing, edited by Kevin Young (Bloomsbury, 2010). The selections are from a poet and anthologist working today and has a fresh feel. For me, the anecdotal nature of many poems makes it perhaps a better book to read through when dealing with grief than a perfect gift for ministers of any kind. But Kevin Young suggests it can be used for both individuals and ceremonies, and the subject index notes poems perhaps best suited for funerals. It also categorizes the poems according to who’s being mourned including: mothers, fathers, siblings, friends and strangers, and daughters and sons: this last includes grief for children not born, or those who survived for less than a day, which I found some of the most heart-breaking poems.



Kevin Young was inspired to put together this collection after writing about the death of his father in his latest poetry collection, Dear Darkness, and he organized this anthology according to some of what he experienced: reckoning, regret, remembrance, ritual, recovery, and redemption. He writes, “A poem must be willing to be unwilled, beckoned by need.” And the need for comfort in the face of death may be answered, for a time, by one of the wonderful elegies by Donald Hall, Galway Kinnell, Natasaha Tretheway, Mark Doty, Lucille Clifton and many others.

I typed my friend copies of poems by Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost, and Mary Oliver, and the one I thought she’d choose by Jane Kenyon: Let Evening Come. I love that poem. I think the Dickinson and Frost are beautiful, but perhaps require more pondering – asking to be looked at on a page, rather than be heard among many other words. And Jane Kenyon’s repetition, a sort of chant, beautifully leads us from grief back to the world.

Even when grief isn’t a big part of your present life, or perhaps even better, this is a good collection for poetry lovers. And you can be the person someone might come to asking for a poem; or feel free to give me a nudge. You know this is the work we live for: answering the question, Any idea of what I should read? It must matter, even when you’re left unsure whether your choices hit the mark. My friend didn’t read aloud the poems I selected or any other, but stayed in the pew to let her daughter read When Great Trees Fall by Maya Angelou. That must have been something, too.

For a roundup of Poetry Friday posts, please visit: Irene Latham at Live. Love. Explore. I’m currently enchanted with Irene’s latest volume of poems, The Color of Lost Rooms, which I’ll blog about later this month.