beloved on the earth: 150 poems of grief and gratitude

I received this book to review with no little wonder as to how I would react to the poetry as I am no stranger to grief and the experiences of death. My first inclination was to turn to the poems concerning the death of a child. But I found the table of contents in alphabetical order by author’s last name. Scanning the list, I found the names of poets well-known to me and others I was not familiar with. So I turned to the preface for wisdom as to how to approach the anthology.

Jim Perlman, editor and publisher of Holy Cow! Press, wanted to create an anthology of poems on grief and gratitude following the death of his mother. He discussed the project with his friends Deborah Cooper, author of four poetry chapbooks who uses poetry in her work with hospice, Mara Hart, a writer of memoir in poetry and prose, and Pamela Mittlefehldt, a poet and mystery writer. They joined Jim in editing this book.

After issuing a public call for poems, they received over two thousand poems. They considered many issues in their selection but ultimately decided on the ones that spoke most intensely to themselves. They decided against organizing the poems by topic as many poems could relate to a number of the categories, but they do provide an index in the back of the book listing the poems by primary focus: child, extended family, father, friend, grandparents, meditation, mother, sibling, and spouse/lover.

I myself came to poetry not by reading poems but by writing them after the sudden death of my son in a car accident. I was frozen by day, going to work, taking care of others in my family, going to a grief support group, and acting as if I were okay. By night, I could not sleep and poetry came to me in agonizing torrents, raw and unrefined, the wail of a mother who wants to “…howl like a wolf/like a blizzard wind tearing” as written by Mara Fulkner in Still Birth: A Psalm of Holy Week.

The grief in this volume is, for the most part, not raw and unrefined. It is distilled by art and often by the distance of time. I decided to read the book from the beginning as it was organized by the editors. I put little sticky notes on pages that spoke to my experiences. Fifteen years after the death of my son, my father died and caring for my mother became my focus until her death eight years later. In between I lost a good friend to breast cancer. I walked through poems of memory care units and Alzheimer’s wings. I looked back with poets on the meaning their parents had brought to their lives. I nodded with understanding for the vigils, the visitations, the dreams of the departed.  I referred to the index in the back at times when I was not sure who the poem was written for. I found I could only read maybe half-a-dozen poems at a time because I would fall into a state of meditation and would have to put the book down. The book closes with Basho: “The temple bell stops,/but the sound keeps coming/out of the flowers.” And so it is.