Tag Archives: Death

The Autobiography of Death by Kim Hyesoon (And Other Stories)

Posted on June 23, 2025 by tearsinthefence
The Autobiography of Death by Kim Hyesoon (And Other Stories)

In this new book, one of a new poetry list from And Other Stories, Death gets to tell its side of the story, to narrate, and offer its opinion to those dead and stuck in a forty-nine day limbo before reincarnation occurs. This is a place of echoes and illusions, of desires, chaos and confusion, surprises, fear and learning.

There are, as our narrator points out and the dead come to realize, things the dead could have done to make both the life just ended and the next one better, for themselves and others, but ultimately there is also a statement about death’s omnipresence in humans:

     You are already born inside death.

            (‘Already DAY TWENTY EIGHT’)

and of despair and helplessness:

     Yourfatherinheaven.   Belovedbullshitfather.   Heasksforthechild.   Atnightthe

     snow    hiddendeepinheaven    fallsflakebyflakesecretly    like thewaymummy

     takesoffitsownbandages      we’reallnakechild      whenthe bandagescomeoff

     DoIpaint    the columnsofthehouseswiththechild’sblood?    Thehouseiscrying.

     Thehouseistrembling.    Yourfatherinheaven.    Belovedbullshitfather.    This

     child.  Thischild. (I write. I write like an abductor. This child this child.)

            (‘A Crow Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest DAY THIRTY EIGHT’)

When the bandages come off, be they spiritual, religious or emotional, we are all naked. Death knows this, yet is still moved by the upset, recognises in itself a sense of abduction, as they spirit the dead away.

Much of this sequence is elegaic and the whole ‘Autobiography’ was written in response to the children lost in the 2014 Sewol Ferry disaster. There is little consolation here, no afterlife or promises for the future. Grief and sorrow seem to remain for those in transition and Death can at times only summarise and explain:

     It’s cold, for you’ve come out from a warm body

     It’s bright, for you’ve come out from a dark body

     It’s lonely, for you’ve lost your shadow

            (‘Winter’s Smile DAY NINETEEN’)

Death here is not a spirit guide, nor a shaman accompanying the dead on a journey. Mostly Death is a commentator, often stating the obvious (to the dead not the reader) as it makes poetry out of the slow fading away and emptying out of past lives:

     World without a sound.   Untouchable,  flat world.   When death dawns,

     world turns into a hard mirror.  Faraway world of hope.

            (‘A Face DAY FORTY-THREE’)

     Now you have completely taken off your face

            (‘Moon Mask DAY FORTY-EIGHT’)

By day forty-nine the soul is ready to return to the world. Death offers some final observations and advice, with a litany of things that do not miss and have not missed the one about to be reborn, instructions not to go searching for one’s own body and a final ‘don’t’:

     Don’t miss you just because you’re not you and I’m the one who’s really you.

            (‘Don’t DAY FORTY-NINE’)

Death has a high opinion of itself yet the long poem ‘Face of Rhythm’, which follows the title sequence, offers a partial rebuttal to its self-proclaimed sovereignty. It is a childlike scream against hurt and suffering, a refusal to be overcome by pain, be that physical or emotional. It is about spiritual anguish and bodily woes, about illness, about being forsaken, about ‘wonder[ing] where my soul hides when I’m sick’ and asking cosmological questions:

     I wonder whether the souls of all the people on earth are connected as one.

This is intriguing work, set in rather small type (too small!), by a major South Korean contemporary poet. Its complex allusions and the strange world or after-world it is set in, are wonderfully conjured up in a musical translation by Don Mee Choi, and partially explained and discussed in a brief but illuminating interview with the poet and a ‘Translator’s Note’. It reminds us all that:

     Death is something that storms in from the outside. The universe inside is bigger.

            (‘Commute DAY ONE’)

Rupert Loydell 23rd June 2025

1 Comment

Posted in Books and tagged , , , , . Bookmark the permalink.

Grief’s Alphabet by Carrie Etter (Seren Books)

Posted on June 10, 2024 by tearsinthefence
Grief’s Alphabet by Carrie Etter (Seren Books)

I’m sceptical of most confessional poetry but Carrie Etter’s book of elegies for her mum is a tough, not-to-be-missed exploration of grief and loss. Although there is a titular poem using the A-Z, the book feels more like a response to what was a plan but soon proved impossible. We only get ‘Notes for A’ and a few other letters such as ‘W Is for Wedding’ and ‘M Is Usually Memory and Occasionally McDonalds’; more poignant perhaps is ‘F Is for Fuck This’, where the title is the complete poem, the poem the closing one of the second of three sections.

It gives an impression of reaching an impasses, the author resisting her own attempt to order her grieving responses which perhaps the writer in her had partly mapped out. Instead we get a wide range of voices, forms and stories which gradually reveal Etter’s past, relationships and loss.

‘Origin Story’, the first section, reveals Etter was adopted, was a sister, had teenage attitude, and tells stories about her Mum, her Dad and of a ‘Pregnant Teenager and her Mama’. Of graduation and travels to England before ‘The News’ arrives back home in the States:

     Crackling across the Atlantic
     my mother’s voice.
     She says ‘Your father,’
     and, as one, we fall.

In time, post coma and now a paraplegic, ‘father’ dies and we are gifted ‘The Last Photograph’ of Mrs. Etter before the poet returns to England. 

Later, or perhaps sooner (we are not told) Etter will have to face ‘The Brink’: her mother’s death, again across the ocean, along with the physical, mental and emotional reactions, most startlingly recorded in ‘The Body in Mourning’. Here, the poet has to endure ‘the daily waking to      mourning’ but also considers the bodily results of grieving:

     O leaky body      such water      such flood, mucus and

     mascara she’d forgotten      her charred cheeks in the mirror

and the body of the deceased:

     the body still, eyes open      a soundless, resounding no

     […]

     the body become stone, the breath       reluctant

     *

     and after years?     the body’s subtler flux

     amid the elements       an hour aflame      or drenched

     weight as mineral     deep in earth      or almost

     transparent, nearly air      thin linen pined to string

     adrift or aloft             depending on

After this open-ended poem, the second section of poems moves to ‘H Is for Hurtle, J Is for July’, a retrospective look back at coping. Then comes the F poem mentioned earlier, an assertion of self, of coping, of having to go on.

Having to go on, however, into the ‘Orphan Age’, the book’s final section. Loss, of course, cannot be simply swept aside; all too often – as I know from firsthand experience – small and often stupid things can trigger grief anew. But you can, and Etter does, take refuge in the everyday, be that snuggling up to a cat or baking and eating tuna casserole. Also the less everyday: Etter gives us a prose poem ‘W Is for Wedding’, acknowledging that her mother both ‘is and isn’t’ there but also content to ‘take a step, then another, toward joy.’

The rest of the book is mostly calm and lucid, philosophical even, with poems about endless birth and rebirth (‘Oroboros’), the memories brought up when playing crazy golf, and the completed alphabet of grief poem. But there is also a hint of mysticism: ‘Instructions for the Glimpse’, the invocation of a ‘Ghost’, and a moving final poem, ‘Reincarnation as Seed’, where a new plant is urged to ‘grow / grow toward light’ as the personification or representation of ‘my dear mother’, urged to ‘bask’ in the sunshine.

Writing poems about death and grieving is an almost impossible task but Etter has managed to carefully walk the tightrope between mawkishness, confession and bewilderment. Her words combine vulnerability and emotion with a writerly detachment, seeing anew and documenting the struggle with ‘not falling face first into woe.’ This is brave, powerful, moving poetry that has clearly been fought for every step of the way.

Rupert Loydell 10th June 2024


1 Comment

Posted in American Poetry, Books, English Poetry and tagged , , , , . Bookmark the permalink.

Ghost Methods by Siofra McSherry (Broken Sleep Books)

Posted on February 11, 2023 by tearsinthefence
Ghost Methods by Siofra McSherry (Broken Sleep Books)

The ghost in the title of this slim pamphlet (37 pages including prelims and a foreword) is the shade of poet Sean Bonney, who was a friend and colleague of McSherry. Many of these poems write back to or are haunted by Bonney, and the best poem, or sequence of poems, in the book is ‘A Series of Posthumous Discourses with Sean Bonney’, which does exactly what it says.

Bonney’s first pamphlet was a scrappy rebellious free verse affair, wrapped in a bright pink cover, entitled Marijuana in the Breadbin. After some further pamphlets from fugitive small presses Salt offered up Pitch Blade Control, and although the alt.publishing continued, Letters Against the Firmament, a surprising choicefrom Enitharmon Press, established Bonney as a revolutionary, considered and angry writer. This was reinforced by the online publication of a Selected Writing (All This Burning, Ill Will Editions) and the analogue volume Our Death from Commune Editions, which confirmed Bonney as a political writer for our time, seemingly as happy on the barricades as within the confines of a paperback book.

McSherry addresses Bonney in various ways and in various places. She adopts his shouty straightforwardness (‘Bonney is fucking dead’), discusses his politics:

   I was just sitting here thinking of you
   and how from a certain perspective society is nothing but the interaction of
   planes of power
   although that’s the kind of perspective that can kills us and in articular you

and welcomes even her privacy to be haunted:

   I welcome your transparent interruptions
   you may peep and glimmer away

The four poems in ‘A Series…’ are unsettled, emotional and yet lucid reflections which move towards a calming acceptance of death and loss, tempered slightly by the idea of the author leaving their writing behind:

   and I am here, I am here, I am still here 
   filling this page with lines that maybe someone somewhere will read
   and know that even so you can hunker down if you want to
   you can write and (same thing) survive

The rest of the poetry in this collection feels less engaged with Bonney, although he lurks as a presence throughout. ‘Zonbi’ plays with the idea of persistence and wished-for resurrection in its discussion of light:

   Light requires no reason to go on,
   so why should you? Get up from the ground

whilst ‘Hamlet V:1’ deconstructs and revisions Shakespeare to focus on the fact that ‘people can get used to anything, / perhaps even knowing that we’ll die.’ Other texts focus on memory, giving blood (a long poem awkwardly printed sideways), ideas of home and transience, whilst ‘A Discourse’ seems to be the poet talking to herself. There is also an autumnal confession that the narrator ‘fell in love with Death’, although at the end of the poem ‘Death quietly drowns.’

If there’s a echo of Anne Sexton in McSherry ‘s report that ‘Wide-eyed Death hovered helplessly by my side’ and that ‘Death has no heart’, all the poems here evidence an ongoing engagement with both Death, personified and abstract, and Bonney himself. McSherry embraces and explores loss, grieving for ‘the names, the many names / my mouth will never form again’, and allows a lover’s words to ‘fall on me in place of you’. There is something very moving and resilient about facing up to absence, ‘star[ing] up into endless night’, whilst reasserting the persistence of poetry in the word.

Rupert Loydell 11th February 2023

1 Comment

Posted in English Poetry, Pamphlet and tagged , , , , . Bookmark the permalink.

A Census of Preconceptions by Oz Hardwick (Survision Books)

Posted on January 9, 2023 by tearsinthefence
A Census of Preconceptions by Oz Hardwick (Survision Books)

Oz Hardwick prose poems are short moments captured from what the author, in ‘Out of Town’, says is ‘Beyond the range of church bells’, where ‘time follows its own instincts’. These gently surreal poems slur time, jump time, and revel in experiential time, where action ceases or slows, allowing the poet time to breathe, take note, follow trains and trails of thought and share them with his readers.

In ‘The Coming of the Comet’, for instance, the original observation of the comet’s trails as ‘fragmented nursery rhymes’ (sky writing) allows the author to imagine reaching up to touch them, although he fears getting his fingers burnt, metaphorically and literally. Then the text undertakes a sideways move towards the ducks who have already flown away from the winter, which allows a digression about other creatures, before the poem swerves into myth and nursery rhymes, with a dying dragon returning us to the burning motif. All that in half a page!

Other poems in this collection are calmer and static. ‘Rain Fugue’ is just that, an ode to the past, lost love, triggered by association with bad weather; whilst ‘The Museum of Silence’ imagines the titular organization as a repository of items such as ’empty headlines, snapped violin strings’, ‘the pressure of gentle arms and the electricity of soft hair falling across eyelids’. The left-unsaid contradiction is the fact that the museum, where ‘There are never any words’, can only be conjured up through the author’s careful arrangement of words.

Elsewhere, there is a gentle humour with a serious undertow: ‘When we stopped wearing watches, our hands became lighter’ (‘The Evolutionary Urge’), ‘In the absence of clear government guidelines, I’ve convinced myself that angels are everywhere’ (‘Epihanies for All’), ‘I’ve changed the locks and changed my mind’ (‘imdb’), ‘Before he moved out, the previous owner hid a volcano in the house’ (‘The Armchair Volcanologist’). The poems are not the slightest bit incendiary though, although they do surprise and occasionally shock. ‘Swarm’, for instance, observes that ‘Bodies break up every day, but still we’re surprised when it happens to us’, before riffing on the idea of a search for ‘an appropriate image’. How to commemorate nothingness, or absence, the fleetingness of life in the grand scheme of things, even when there might be ‘sweetness at the heart of our shattering’?

These are poems where ‘Difficult questions push between simple gestures’ (‘Highway Blues’) and ‘Graveyards are the new shopping malls’ where visitors are ‘browsing their quiet aisles, comparing prices and window-shopping afterlives’. This set-up at the beginning of ‘Bargain’ allows Hardwick, or the poem’s narrator, a chance to remember, countering the fact that his ‘own family leave no trace’. He recalls a religious cult leafletting student groups, the notion of ‘a loving god whose face is too bright to see clearly’, and rescues his family from oblivion, before asking about ‘rest and redemption, about spreading payments, and about insurance in case of cancellation due to unforeseen circumstances’. The deity only offers him a brochure which contains only ‘a list of names printed in invisible ink’ inside it.

But this is not a dour or miserable book. Yes, it reflects upon death, beliefs, and doubts, but mostly it is full of joyous associations and playful observations, delightful moments and wonders from the world that readers can share. As Hardwick says in ‘Please Make Up My Room’, ‘Just because they are in your handwriting doesn’t mean they are necessarily your words’, and I guess the reverse is true: these words can become ours.

Rupert Loydell 9th January 2023

1 Comment

Posted in Books, English Poetry, Prose Poems and tagged , , , , . Bookmark the permalink.