INVENTIONS OF FAREWELL

The ways of grief are varied and scary, asserts editor Gilbert (English/Univ. of California), particularly in today’s climate of “mounting theological and social confusion.” To prove her point, she offers a healthy selection of elegies from the English language. The poems here range from classic 16th-century sentiments (John Donne’s “Death, be not proud”) to little-known contemporary American renderings of loss (Ruth Stone’s bittersweet “Curtains”), from A.E. Housman’s distanced, public lament for a fallen hero (“To an Athlete Dying Young”) to Donald Hall’s beautiful and wrenchingly intimate tribute to Jane Kenyon (“Last Days”). Read in proximity, they offer a fascinating overview of styles of mourning changing with the passage of time. The sheer volume of what one might call the “Demerol dirges” of 20th-century poets (in which they honor their beloveds’ entreaties to die at home) speaks volumes to the progress and fallout of the past century’s biotechnological advances. Gilbert attempts to enhance the reader’s formation of a socio-historical view of dealings with death by arranging the elegies chronologically within thematic groups, but this breakdown often proves more circuitous than revealing.

A telling collection of poets at their best in the face of life’s worst moments.