Poetry lights a path through the shadowlands of grief
Poems for When You Can't Find the Words: one for those who have loved and lost.
There are no words to comfort someone who has suffered a double bereavement. The uncomfortable truth of that is laid bare by Jean Callanan, chair of the Irish Hospice Foundation, who describes how everyone struggled to find words when she and her family found themselves facing such incalculable loss.
“‘No words’ was like a mantra,” she says. “Everyone struggled with words, including me and my family, the bereaved. Poets had words though and we reached out to them in our pain and confusion.” The words of poet Christina Rossetti at one funeral and WB Yeats at the other offered not only solace but articulated “these huge, bewildering experiences that stretch the limits of human understanding”.
Those borrowed words helped her and her family negotiate a tentative path through the shadowlands of grief, as she spells out in the moving foreword to Poems For When You Can’t Find The Words, an exceptional collection of poems designed to help others do the same.
Patrick Kavanagh’s beautiful In Memory of My Mother is in there, a poem that provided the only relief on the heavy day of my own mother’s funeral. When the coffin closed for the last time, I thought of the poem’s opening lines: “I do not think of you lying in the wet clay/ of a Monaghan graveyard; I see/ you walking down a lane among the poplars/ on your way to the station...”For a few uplifting moments, I thought of her walking down the lane to the local shop using her walking stick like a wand rather than an aid while saying a polite ‘No thank you’ to all offers of help. Independent and graceful to the end.
The Monaghan poet’s tribute to his father graces the pages too. Its lines, “Every old man I see/ Reminds me of my father”, describe in simple yet powerful terms the feeling of seeing your loved one long after they are gone. For a single moment they are back but then the jolt of loss rushes again into the void.
For a description of that awful void, it would be hard to better poet Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill’s stunning rendition, translated from Irish by Paul Muldoon, in From Carnival: “When I left you/ at the quay tonight/ an enormous trench opened up/ in my core/ so profound/ it would not be filled/ even if you were to pour/ from one utensil/ the streams of the Mull of Kintyre/ and the Irish Sea and the English Channel.” I felt winded after reading that and found myself returning to it again and again. My still-new edition already has many dog-eared pages, marking poems that do just as the title promises; provide words when you can’t find any.
This is a book to have to hand at all times. Indeed, that is one of the objectives of the team that came together, meitheal-like, to compile it. “It’s made to be used,” says Dominic Campbell, arts officer of the Irish Hospice Foundation. “It is robust enough to make it last and portable so that it could pop up anywhere… in your pocket, in hospitals, in GP surgeries.”
He says he hopes it will open up conversations at a very difficult time. “Maybe you can’t talk about grief, but you can talk about one of the poems in this book.” “Poets,” he says rather poetically himself, “are like traffic wardens of the soul” who help us come to terms with something that is difficult to understand and even more so to express.
He recalls how his grandfather, John Cook, an engineer, was moved to write the only poem in his life when his wife of 65 years, Henrietta, died. “The only way that he could think to express her absence was through a poem.” The idea for this collection came from a chance conversation between Poetry Ireland’s education officer Dr Jane O’Hanlon and the Hospice Foundation’s then public engagement officer Rebecca Lloyd in 2020, just as the Covid-19 pandemic was gathering pace.
If ever there was a time to reflect on death, it has been over the last incredibly difficult few years. The cruelty of that time and how it robbed loved ones of the rituals that help us to grieve is reflected in Dorothy Duffy’s hard-hitting poem, My sister is not a statistic. On the “Deathometer of Covid”, she was listed as “an older person with underlying health conditions” — a throwaway line “among the platitudes and lowered eyes”, as the poet/sister puts it.
“Her underlying conditions were/Love/ Kindness/ Belief in the essential goodness of mankind/ Uproarious laughter/…A force of nature/ And so much more” The modern reality of death is also captured vividly in Cyber You where poet Julie O’Callaghan turns to YouTube when she needs to see her loved one living and breathing: “And there you are being you/ (the tiny you)/ with the tie I bought you/ for Christmas.” The collection unites work from the growing community of Ireland’s new poets — Abby Oliveira, Eriko Tsugawa-Madden, Nandi Jola and Supriya Kaur Dhaliwal — with some of our oldest laments, such as Muiríoch’s 13th-century lament for his wife. The latter might have been written yesterday as the poet outlines the aimless life he sees before him.
“Half my body that bright candle, half my eyes, half my side, half my life on a cold slab, half my death that woman hero,” he writes.
Grief is not only universal but timeless.
While the collection grapples with loss in all its painful forms, it also provides much hope. The collection’s editor Mary Shine Thompson said the team wanted to echo Seamus Heaney’s final message to his wife in the hours before he died: “Don’t be afraid, or as he put it, ‘noli timere’.
“The poems in this collection do not deny that gloom might encircle death and bereavement; but they offer at least a flicker of light,” she said.
One of them comes from the exceptional pen of Emily Dickinson: “‘Hope’ is the thing with feathers —/ That perches in the soul — / And sings the tune without the words — / And never stops — at all — ” The collection ends with Brendan Kennelly’s inspiring and ever-soothing Begin, which awakens the fragile stirrings of hope and new beginnings after loss. As he writes: “Though we live in a world that dreams of ending/ that always seems about to give in/ something that will not acknowledge conclusions/ insists that we forever begin.”
Pandemic aside, some 80 people die every day in Ireland yet, as Dominic Campbell of the Irish Hospice Foundation says, we are still not sure what to do with the grief that accompanies it. On any given day, an estimated 800 people will be trying to come to terms with the loss of a loved one.
“The idea of this book is to help people through the process of grief and bereavement. The idea of a good death is what the Hospice Foundation is all about. Grief never goes away, but we can build life back around it.” This book offers solace, words, hope and invaluable lessons in the management of our sorrow.
- Poems For When You Can’t Find The Words, edited by Mary Shine Thompson, is published by Gill Books at €16.99
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