Seminary Journal 2008 (August) - Virginia Theological Seminary

The male Muse and tutelary of
Parnassus
“Peter Mark Roget,
breathe for this inarticulate
maker
of the temporary verb: supply
language
as he makes up strophes fi t to
be counted
Parnassian song.”
What makes this collection
most poignant and compelling is that
it includes these poems that celebrate
life in various ways in the same volume
with Hall’s anguished and beautiful
poetry about the illness and death of
Jane Kenyon, and his grieving for her.
Here is the poet using his gifts in ways
that name what is most tender and
terrible in our common human life.
People who have cared for a loved one
dying of cancer will recognize the pattern
of the experience he describes, and
appreciate the particulars that enable
him to name and move through this
experience. This is the discipline of attentiveness
at its most demanding.
In the section entitled “All”
we enter the nightmare world of a
cancer diagnosis and intensive chemotherapy.
These poems include the deep
tenderness we see in earlier poems
shared with Jane but now they are
laced through with the deep indignities
that intensive cancer treatment
brings. In “Her Long Illness,” we have
the faithful attendance and the grief of
the husband who can only be present.
Daybreak until nightfall,
He sat by his wife at the hospital
While chemotherapy dripped
Through the catheter into her heart.
He drank coffee and read
the Globe. He paced, he worked
VIRGINIA SEMINARY JOURNAL AUGUST 2007
on poems; he rubbed her back
and read aloud. Overcome with dread,
they wept and affi rmed
their love for each other, witlessly,
over and over again.
Many will also recognize the
surreal quality of the hospital experience,
which he compares in one poem
to a ship under way “the huge vessel.
. . without arrival or destination, its
great engines pounding.” In “Without,”
a poem without punctuation, he
conveys the surreal quality of the hospital
life, experienced while Jane was
undergoing a bone marrow transplant:
we lived in a small island
stone nation
without color under gray
clouds and wind
distant the unlimited ocean
acute
lymphoblastic leukemia without
seagulls
or palm trees without vegetation
The blending in these poems of richly
evocative poetic image and plain
medical terminology is heartbreaking
and real. Even more so are the poems
about Jane’s last days and death. And
perhaps most striking and powerful,
the series of poems entitled “Letters
Without Addresses” chronicles the
year following Jane Kenyon’s death,
when the poet writes letters to her,
reporting on the life they shared, as if
she were there, but knowing that she
is gradually receding. The grief that
speaks here is eloquent and recognizable,
for anyone who has lost a
beloved spouse, the language naming
emotions for which most of us cannot
fi nd words:
When I try talking with
strangers
I want to run out of the room
into the woods with turkeys
and foxes
I want to talk only
about words we spoke back
and forth
when we knew you would
die.
I want never to joke or argue
Or chatter again. I want never
to think or feel.
Yet even in the depths of such grief
this poet practices the art of attentiveness,
and in spite of himself celebrates
the richness of the life he has shared
with the one he has lost. You can hear
the relationship in the way he tells of
what he sees, in “Christmas Letter”:
doves
This fi rst Advent alone
I feed the small birds of snow
Black-oil sunfl ower seed
As you used to do. Every day
I stand trembling with joy
to watch them: Fat mourning
compete with red squirrels
for spill from rampaging nuthatches
with rusty breasts
and black-and-white face
masks
this year late autumn darkness
punishes me as it used
to punish you. . . .
These poems provide an anatomy of
grief, perhaps a helpful reminder to
those of us who minister to grieving
friends of the depth of suffering that
such loss brings. The section entitled
“Throwing Away” refl ects with ordinary
images the spiritual discipline
of purgation. He lets her peonies go,
137