Review
Grief Suite by Bobbi Lurie
CW Books, 2010
Reviewed by Janelle Elyse Kihlstrom
Bobbi Lurie's third poetry collection, "Grief Suite," deals with grief and loss in several of its pitiless varieties, from grief for a lost or dying parent, grief for one's lost health and the accompanying loss of existential innocence, for youth, for treasured possessions, and even for the anchor of sanity.
The cover woodcut, created by the author herself, sets the tone of this collection with an image of a wraithlike being, creased and emaciated with suffering, and the opening poem, Traveling North," begins powerfully: "Though you are dead now. Though I walk covered in dust through this strip mall in Iowa. I/ remember the collection of tendencies that led me here. Your hand reaching out to strike. Your hand reaching up to/ brush the hair from your brow. I never knew which. I never knew when. Your hand."
In stark, precise, unflinching language, Lurie's speakers confront the past and the present, often tangling with memory-imbued objects and language itself to make themselves heard.
In the lengthy title poem, a grieving daughter repeatedly intones, "Everything speaks for the mother". For her, grief is omnipresent in the landscape, the natural and the human worlds.
"Once My Heart Was Wide and Loved the World," a poem about cancer, is incisive in its candour:
You give the news out in tiny spoonfuls. People chew on it until it becomes familiar. You are dimmer to them now. You glimmer in the distance with your fate. Each man wears his words not his deeds. And if you believe in the world of words... You watch the others retreat At the entrance of the cancer factory not presented to them yet. But to us it is. "To me alone," we say in unison.
Before closing with the title refrain, the poem affirms again the limits of language: "The past has no pages./ A word can't come near the thing it stands for."
The collection also closes strongly, with poems like "Strange Light," a surprising glimpse of shared final moments between loved ones for whom things have not been easy.
It begins with, "I sensed he felt relief in his sickness./ Clearly he was content that the end was near", and ends with, "I sat there with him all night, watched him, breathing serene, machines beeping, drips/ dripping fluids into his arm, feeling he was happy and that I was happy too, in the stark,/ strange room."
The next poem, "Rasa," in stark language and stripped of the conventional syntax and mechanics employed through most of the collection, relates a fantasy of living without attachment that ends, simply, "we are free".
The very last poem, the only one in its section, suggests a degree of closure when grief and language meet in the closing line: "And I found the dark spelling of my life."
In these bold, lucid poems, Lurie examines many faces of grief while eschewing both maudlin self-pity and the cruel clichés that seal off the bereaved and afflicted in modern-day archetypes of suffering, isolating them from what they most require, another heart that heals by hearing. "True is the friend," she writes, "who stays with you in hell."
Bobbi Lurie has two previous poetry collections, Letter From The Lawn (CW Books, 2006) and The Book I Never Read (CW Books, 2003). Her poems have been included in numerous print and online journals, including APR and New American Writing.
