One Way through Grief: Without by Donald Hall

Having recently lost a loved one and tried to capture it, I turned to anthologies and other poets to see how they handled it. The single poems in anthologies often inadequate, so it was in books I found the greater satisfaction. Hall's Without captures some of the magnitude and breadth of it. Sharon Old's The Father is another one which I intend to discuss which holds yet another perspective. There seem to be as many ways to confront grief as there are poets and those beloveds who pass before them.

One of the best short poems is probably the title poem, which lists all the things the speaker is now without now that he has lost his wife. It is conveyed without capitalization or punctuation--a long breathless (apart from line breaks) rattling of loss:

hours days weeks months weeks days hours
the year endured without punctuation
february without ice winter sleet
snow melted recovered but nothing
without thaw although cold streams hurtled
no snowdrop or crocus rose no yellow
no red leaves of maple without october

It's as though the speaker struggles describe the thing he cannot describe by describing the absence in a compressed jumble of thought. As you can see here, there's even a sense of compressed or rapid time.

The other strong short poem is "Blues for Polly"--Polly being the speaker's mother-in-law who is dying at the same time as his wife is dying. It has great scope running from an impoverished but culturally rich background, to their last meeting, to a photograph found when she passed away:

Polly was singing
with a band in a Chicago nightclub--
eighteen years old, pretty,
the minister's ambitious daughter
just out of high school, excitement
and terror enlarging her eyes
as she made her sorrowful noise
to the Lord in a smoky room
of gamblers, gangsters, and girls.
She sang blue: soulful, erotic,
skeptical, knowing everything
turns out bad in the end.

The word "ambitious" plays a larger role with its root origin "to go around" which joins it to other ambi- words like ambiguous and ambidextrous and we see a woman here who is stretching into what some might see as opposing territories and ends "knowing everything" (which of course gets twisted to an entirely different meaning by the last line).

Grief in Hall's book cuts from a fragmentary cloth, stitched together at lengths. The best piece, if it is a piece, is the patchwork known as "Her Long Illness" which is labeled as being "continued at intervals"--that is, if I follow correctly, the long poem is broken up by other poems. The clue seems to be a kind of fuzzy asterisk or pollen that precedes each unnamed poem. But then, "Last Days" has the same preceding image. You could argue either way, but for me, "Last Days" is similar in tone and presentation, so it's more of a marker or demarcation within "Her Long Illness."

There's nothing especially powerful about any one part. In fact, each part might feel like an interesting if weak poem, such as the wife spelling out "L E U K E M I A" with the refrigerator magnets. Some pieces don't seem to fit like the speaker's dream of choking his wife, which one can read into in a number of ways (anger at her imminent departing), but for me it captures an honest attempt at rendering the irrational grasping our minds make in that state. A rational reason for the dream's placement in the book may not exist. What glues the work together is this continuous piece of grief broken when other parts enter the picture and returns again and again until it's finally over.

I read the book in paper and on my Kindle. The latter is a great tool to find out what lines stuck out for other readers. They loved the passages where the speaker tries to do something for his wife but cannot: "Inside him / some four-year-old / understood that if he was good... / she would not leave him." Another was realizing that he should have been contented before the diagnosis, so he should be contented now before her death. And "Dying is simple.... / What's worst is... the separation." "Letter with No Address", "Letter in the New Year", "Midwinter Letter" and "Letter after a Year" also had several passages readers wanted to remember. Sometimes these lines are memorable, sometimes imagistic, but almost always emotionally potent even if it's something that's been said before. Whether they should do this or not is a matter of a different debate, but writers can lose sight of what's important to readers.