Paula Becker, A LITTLE BOOK OF SELF-CARE FOR THOSE WHO GRIEVE

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A LITTLE BOOK OF SELF-CARE FOR THOSE WHO GRIEVE, Paula Becker, Girl Friday Productions, 2021.

I want to share this book with you. It’s not poetry, but it’s a lot like poetry, and recommends it: “Poetry can crack grief open and smooth it down, howl its depths…” The book combines beautiful illustrations by Rebekah Nichols. The design is by Rachel Marek, but the book is a collaboration. The art and ample white space give the words room to breathe.

Ask friends for help when you are overwhelmed. Do not set time limits for yourself. If grief flares suddenly, as grief will do, cancel plans, even at the last minute.

The book is available widely — your local independent bookshop may have a copy waiting for you.

 

Elaina M. Ellis, WRITE ABOUT AN EMPTY BIRDCAGE

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WRITE ABOUT AN EMPTY BIRD CAGE, Elaina M. Ellis, Write Bloody Publishing, 2011.

I bought this odd collection of poems by Elaina M. Ellis a few years ago, at the Chuckanut Writers Conference. Every so often I pick it up and am inspired by its bravery, its sexual bravado, and its writing prompts. The poems are arranged into 5 sections:

Write About an Empty Birdcage
Advice for the Newly Single
What I Wish for at 11:11
Write About an Ugly Animal
Welcome Back

Some of the poems are long, dense with detail, rich with the nerve it takes for a young woman in our culture (think 2011 and before) to come out and be completely herself. This short poem struck me; it’s from the first section, but I imagine the prompt as, Write about something intangible that you inherited from your family:

Heirloom

There is a loose strand of inheritance
called appetite. I have pulled it slow

from the hem of my mother’s skirt.
She is unraveled, but see—

it was not hers to begin with.
Let us pray.

Our Fathers, who emptied the shelves
so we could not get fat,

hollow be thy names. See
how I am still eating.

I have smashed down every quiet bit
of plate and glass from the cupboard.

—Elaina M. Ellis

Because I have three young (or “youngish,” at this point) daughters, each of whom has struggled in one way or another with relationships—with themselves, with others—I appreciated this book. It made me wonder if (reading through “Advice for the Newly Single”) I couldn’t challenge myself to be…braver. (Not yet.)

This poem reminded me of when my girls were young. Stuck in the car with me, if they saw the dashboard clock read 11:11, they would shout out the number, squeeze shut their eyes, and make a wish. If you shared the wish, they said, it wouldn’t come true. What did they wish for? What do I wish for?

What I Wish for at 11:11

I want
a fat blue bird
to keep me awake at night.
I want a room full of her loud
blue rustles. I want a fat blue bird
to shake and shriek her fat blue body
truly through me. I want fat
mouthfuls of feathers,
pillows stained
blue.

—Elaina M. Ellis

Learn (much) more at Artist Trust.

Neile Graham, THE WALK SHE TAKES

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THE WALK SHE TAKES, Neile Graham, MoonPath Press, 2019.

This morning I took a walk across Scotland—and across several centuries—with Neile Graham. She reminded me of something I was told when I visited Chartres Catheral: don’t travel as a tourist, but as a pilgrim. “Why did I leave my shore for another?,” Graham asks in “Atlantic Pacific.” This collection of poems answers that question.

In this excerpt, I don’t know if she is referring to the black dog of depression, but that’s how it resonates with me:

I dare the black dog

to rise out of my bones, out of the shadows
to flicker fey at the edge of my vision.

Offer a vision. Mine/yours/another’s.
Driving along the winding coastline,

marking the bends of the sea
as it shapes the land…

The place names create much of the pleasure here: Machrie Moor, Smailholm Tower, Lockerbie, Inchcolm Abbey, Ring of Brodgar, Kilmichael Glassary. And the unapologetic use of Scots, some familiar, some not: kail yard, cruisie, cottar, cairn. But Graham’s own gift for language, for image, for color, makes up the rest. As in this poem:

Kilchurn Castle Picturesque

Rough waters: steel-blue, white-capped
like the clouds above. Low hills raise the sky,
shade up to hunter green, sage green,
then misty mountain blue. A storybook view
across the loch to where Kilchurn nestles at its edge
etched out against the loch like a hill itself.
Closer, and towers define themselves,
windows yaw and gape,
chimneys dagger a path to the sky.

Above the doorway: 1693 and crowns. A shield.
Ropes twined like snakes and Celtic knottery.
We climb and duck. I pose,
surprised in an archway. A fallen turret
the plinth for a statue my now-dead father becomes,
my mother laughing at us, she who now
has forgotten her life. In my camera Kilchurn’s light
sears this instant into history, true beauty:
grey stone and a span of grace.

—Neile Graham

I have a handful of travel poems myself, and have never known how to weave them into the tapestry of a book. Neile Graham has the answer—stay longer, write more. “When a mile-long walk can take you 5000 years” (“Westness Walk: Rousay”), then why not?

Graham is Canadian-born but a long resident of Seattle. I am claiming her as a kindred spirit. Learn more at MoonPath Press or at her website (lots of links to more poetry): https://neilegraham.com.

Christopher Howell, THE GRIEF OF A HAPPY LIFE

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THE GRIEF OF A HAPPY LIFE, Christopher Howell, Pacific Northwest Poetry Series, University of Washington Press, 2019.

On the back cover, Kathy Fagan writes: “Howell has been for many years my go-to poet of choice when I need to be reminded of what a poem can do, what a poetry collection can do…”

I can say the same. Howell asks, in “The Giant Causes the Apocalypse,” “[W]hat will comfort us / as we hear our singing stop?” This sometimes strange, sometimes disconcerting collection of poems is an exploration of that question.

The grief in the title permeates the book, without weighing it down, like these lines from “Turnpike and Flow”:

We say it is a long road
but it is only
a life
slipping past, dark and bright, abandoning
a few broken tools and shoes, once
in a while something beautiful but too big
to carry.

Howell is truly a gem in the Washington State poetry world. He has 20 books. He teaches in the master of fine arts program at Eastern Washington University, and is an editor/director for both Lynx House Press and Willow Spring Books. Let us say he has a large and interested following. So it’s odd to find, bracketed in the middle of a long poem, these words: “[Sometimes I want you to stop / reading so I can / go on alone into the dark sublingual light…” (“Cloud of Unknowing”). I love the juxtaposition of dark with light. It’s a sentence (it’s a whole book) that takes chances.

Maybe Howell isn’t so much exploring the big questions, as urging his readers to explore them.

Here’s the final poem, which first appeared in Poetry International: 

Homecoming

I put on my good black shoes, my shirt
of grey softness that reminds me of luck,

and the blue hat given me
by a child who left

this earth that even her shadow
made so beautiful.

And then, well, I set out
down the clamor of roads

and, almost by accident, onto paths
through dense apothecaries of evergreen and fern

and finally to meadow and orchard
risen from the dead into a contentment

that did not know me
and wouldn’t take my money or my name.

Did I not see I was the same no one
who had lived there always

and could never return?
Did I not perceive the multitudes

waving their arms like wind to be known again
and gathered like pieces of a god?

How many many years, how much spent blood,
to unpilgrim ourselves, to stand before an empty house

glistening with the grief of a happy life.

—Christopher Howell

“…and after that there must be the dancing” he writes in “Surveillance.” Or, “the dancing / and the weeping / and the feast.”

You can learn more about Christopher Howell at https://www.eou.edu/mfa/faculty/christopher-howell-poetry/, or on Wikipedia and Artist Trust. I found “A Conversation with Christopher Howell” about this particular book at https://truemag.org/2018/11/08/a-conversation-with-christopher-howell/.