Silent Forests of the Heart

Is there an ethics of representation around the work of mourning? How should one write in the face of grief? Is extravagance a suitable response to the enormity of loss, or should one opt for spare restraint, as Mary Jo Bang does when writing about the death of a son. In “You Were You Are Elegy,” from Elegy (2007), she scrapes language down, as if linguistic fuss and metaphor might misrepresent, falsify, or let loose something dangerous:

Fragile like a child is fragile.
Destined not to be forever.
Destined to become other
To mother. Here I am
Sitting on a chair, thinking
About you. Thinking
About how it was
To talk to you.

Bang’s tone and means are fairly consistent throughout Elegy. By contrast, in That This (2010), Susan Howe tries out a series of approaches to the death of her husband. The book begins in clear, utilitarian prose:

The water was boiling, I poured it over the cereal, stirred it, then stopped. The house was so still. I called his name … I went into his room. He was lying in bed with his eyes closed. I knew when I saw him with the CPAP mask over his mouth and nose and heard the whooshing sound of air blowing air that he wasn’t asleep. No.

But soon it moves to appropriated text, collage, and photos and concludes with lineated lyric fragments. One wants to get grief right, more than almost any other subject, because to falsify grief is to trivialize and oversimplify what’s quiet, chaotic, lonely, meditative, howling, numb, exposed.

These days, I approach books of poems about grief with personal as well as professional interest; in 2020, my husband died in hospice care after a long illness. Reading Niina Pollari’s Path of Totality (Soft Skull Press, 2022)—a grim, whimsical, necessary oddity of a book about the sudden death of Pollari’s baby—I wanted to know: What does it feel like to lose a child at birth? How is that experience of loss different from my own? “I want to apologize,” Pollari writes in “I’m Sorry,” one of the book’s many prose poems. “I’m sorry that I have had to pull you down with me into this antechamber full of cold blood bags.” It’s hard to imagine that kind of imagery in, for example, Bang’s poems; certainly, it would be melodramatic in my own situation. But in the context of the pregnant body and the mess of birth—and the fact that babies aren’t supposed to die—the ghoulishness is apt. This is a dark, benumbed book. It’s also lucid about emotions that are hard to illuminate, and it’s frequently energetic, as Pollari swerves through memory and aftermath. Whether by temperament or poetics, Path of Totality doesn’t feel like much else in its category of concern.

Consider “On My First Son,” Ben Jonson’s poem about his child’s death at age seven, in 1603, from the plague. The poem is heartbroken and tender—but it’s not much about the boy. Instead, Jonson laments the loss of part of his identity (“O, could I lose all father now!”) and contemplates his sense of culpability and just punishment (“Farewell, thou child of my right hand, and joy; / My sin was too much hope of thee, lov’d boy”). He compares the boy to a perfect, curtailed poem: “Rest in soft peace, and ask’d say ‘Here doth lie / Ben Jonson his best piece of poetry.’”

Or take “One Art,” in which Elizabeth Bishop spends five of six stanzas denying the force of loss (“so many things seem filled with the intent / to be lost that their loss is no disaster”), then enumerates lost “door keys…my mother’s watch…houses…two cities…two rivers, a continent.” The lost things escalate in magnitude and importance even as the villanelle conducts its regularities and recursions: “I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster.” The contrasting great loss alluded to at the end is delivered not outright but by way of qualification—“Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture / I love) I shan’t have lied”—as Bishop continues suppressing any expression of outright urgency until her famous “(Write it!)” barges into the line. Even then Bishop stages control: the outburst is parenthetical, only looks “like disaster,” and the poem finally bears down on its quietude, deploying a final period that settles the mood after an uncharacteristic exclamation point. It’s as if Bishop is containing something powerful, thus magnifying the poem’s force. This convinces readers all the more of Bishop’s depth of feeling.

Another astonishing encapsulation of feeling after loss occurs in Gwendolyn Brooks’s “The Last Quatrain of the Ballad of Emmett Till.” The eight-line “Quatrain” (each of the four lines of a quatrain snapped in half) is a portrait of Till’s mother, “a pretty-faced thing; / the tint of pulled taffy,” who

…sits in a red room,
           drinking black coffee.
She kisses her killed boy.
           And she is sorry.
Chaos in windy grays
           through a red prairie.

Jonson looks at himself; Bishop submerges feeling in form and tonal restraint; and Brooks, in a political poem about a particular suffering, creates in a couple of lines—“Chaos in windy grays / through a red prairie”—an image of devastating maternal loss. Of course, none of these poets are really writing elegy; these are poems about bereavement. Grief, though, is shapeless. As Edward Hirsch puts it in Gabriel: A poem (2014), his book-length elegy for a dead son:

I did not know the work of mourning
Is like carrying a bag of cement
Up a mountain at night
 
The mountaintop is not in sight
Because there is no mountaintop

Pollari’s writing of bereavement is necessarily different from all of these precursors. It’s not just a matter of poetics. Brooks’s imagining of a deeply personal moment in the context of a race crime centers around the murder of a teenager; Hirsch and Bang respond to the deaths of young men. Bishop is cagey about her object but, given her biography, it’s easy to assume she’s lamenting a lost lover. Howe was writing about losing her husband. Even Jonson had his son for seven years plus a Christian faith that allowed him to frame an understanding of death. But the daughter in Pollari’s fragmented narrative died at birth. In Pollari’s book, there’s love, devastation, and a void at the heart of things.

Although Pollari’s two modes—prose poem and wide-spaced lineation—each have their respective typographic and syntactical consistency from poem to poem, both modes allow big, quick shifts in focus and tone. The dynamic “Sunflower” begins with a splash of brightness on a fire escape—and turns suddenly:

In the maternity ward, there was an emblem on our door of a calla lily, the flower of funerals. The emblem was there to warn anyone entering about the atmosphere of the room. All the other rooms in the ward received sunflower emblems.

In another poem, Pollari describes waking up from anesthesia into “a hopeless wall of sadness. A dead end. A polar darkness.” She notes her “embarrassment…when the nurses walked in and looked at me with their eyes full of clinical sympathy. I felt embarrassed at how I hadn’t seen the trajectory by which I would end up in a public hospital in South Brooklyn without my beloved baby.” That move from nearly abstract figuration to memoir is characteristic, striking, and endearing. Pollari’s reference to a “public hospital” is an instance of her occasional engagement with class; other poems mention Wall Street and the insurance industry. “I hope when the desolation comes for you and grips you by the wrist and flings you into the night, you happen to be clutching your insurance paperwork,” she writes.

In general, Pollari’s prose poems are made of disparate parts: “The forest where we used to picnic is ash,” she writes in “No Redemption Arc.” Next paragraph: “Last winter someone murdered a bear in its den and it was perfectly legal.” Next, she narrates herself “sit[ting] near a small fire telling my selfish tale to everyone who gathers.” A short paragraph later: “The cut bodies of flowers travel across the world in boxes, in trucks that emit fossil fuels. The flowers end up at a wedding or on top of a casket.” Burnt forests, the treatment of animals, camping, cut flowers—these images evoke what humans do in and to nature, and they lead back to death. But Pollari avoids connecting the dots. By contrast, her lineated poems float in white space, more linear. There are no stanzas, just line after enjambed line, with few punctuation marks, as if utterances are pulled with difficulty from an encompassing blankness. “Self-Portrait as New York Geography” is a spare and intermittent narration of the speaker’s environment:

A polluted estuary
 
With the prosaic name East River
 
Creeps along the shoreline
 
Let me describe the sky to you

There’s poetry—Poetry—in that, but it comes out in stymied gasps, as if the speaker’s consciousness is continually fragmenting. The longer line of description that follows is flattened by the copulative verb, static details, and wan delivery:

The sky is high and creamy-metallic with birds like vanilla
        flecks
 
On the other side the monoliths stand crowded and vertical
 
It’s beautiful if you have the capacity to appreciate beauty

The upshot, however, is that the image is eerily accurate to gulls over the East River; the poet’s trick of proposing and simultaneously retracting an image’s potential for beauty is also a means—moving and a bit witty—of conveying a bereaved state.

The apparatus of focus and refocus works differently in Pollari’s prose pieces. In “Compassion,” she considers human consumption of animals:

I sometimes do. I eat sardines that are packed side by side. I forget about their swimming when I do this.
 
But they are pulled from the ocean and put into a tin.

Is eating sardines some kind of analogy? Even if you’re against eating sardines (and Pollari isn’t, really, in this poem), what happens to sardines doesn’t happen to human babies. A further instance of consumption follows. Moving from “I” to an unspecified “you”—maybe an intimate, maybe a stand-in for the self, seen at a distance, Pollari writes of “a drink that had a whole egg in it…And you drank it down as if it was nothing.” Perhaps this is an extreme version of a whiskey sour, but why the tone of surprise in “as if it were nothing”? It can’t be that there’s an ethical something opposed to that nothing—unless one is a vegan—about an unfertilized chicken egg in a drink. And there’s no real analogy, as far as I can see, between an unfertilized chicken egg and a human baby conceived with egg and sperm and carried to term. The tone is hard to read—maybe it’s amused and admiring because the “you” has drunk something that seems icky? But then what’s it doing near the sardines, and what’s it doing in relation to the paragraph that follows?

You have to eat, the nurse said. We have to see you eat. The staff brought me rolls, vegetable soup, a pudding cup. One of my actions of mothering, for nine months, had been to eat. Afterward, I didn’t want to eat because it was only for me.

This passage is compelling in its immediacy, a clear description, unmediated by figuration, of the experience of loss and its curiously specific manifestations. Then the scene shifts to an animal rights protest in New York’s Union Square, in which strangely garbed activists “circle carcasses on a tarp. The carcasses are the bodies of lambs and chickens and dogs. The people scoop them up like they are beloved.” Here again: animals, animal rights, living things that are no longer living—but again, too, an ethical incompatibility, this time intensified and deliberately off-putting. The demonstration registers more as a creepy dream than as a real event—do animal rights activists generally have access to dog and lamb carcasses? Do they wear nets while hugging them? If I track my own responses to what’s happening here, I notice:

• Thinking about this scenario distracts me from the scene in the hospital, the only scene in the poem with real, individual human feeling.
• I still can’t tell if Pollari is proposing moral equivalency between the treatment of food animals and the death of a baby. I rather hope she isn’t, but …
• Maybe there’s something unimpeachable and authentic about a bereaved mother attempting to make analogies that don’t work, something that correlates with the experience of grief, in which connections break apart.
• Whether or not this poem is ethically problematic, it’s unforgettable.

And it’s not that dog carcasses are outlandish in the world of Path of Totality. The book also has leaking catheters, sweat and an itchy abdomen, suffering that “spread over the bed and dripped into the floorboards,” and a website where “people posted pictures of their own cuts. The skin cut to the dermis, the fat underneath like a layer of sauce. I carved a symbol onto my ankle…” But the overwhelming tone throughout is deceptively dispassionate, as in “Hungry Ghost,” a poem set in a café:

All the tables were taken
 
So we sat in a row of three on a bench
 
A large painting of a bull behind us on the wall
 
The funeral director, my husband, and me
 
I ordered a small caffeine-free tea
 
I needed to order something
 
To pretend we were there
 
For a normal reason
 
On this day in October
 
Just days after my daughter
 
Came out of me not breathing
 
I sat behind the barrier of my husband
 
So that I could hide my face if I needed to
 
And he covered me with his huge emotional wingspan
 
Even though he was also feeling devastation
 
And as I signed the paper
 
I screamed in the silent forest of my heart.

Straightforward description escalates quickly and without warning. The bull—its odd, painted, anti-expressive, slightly humorous presence—is at first just a quirky detail. But it takes on force when Pollari likens her husband to a great bird, and her own heart to a terrifying forest. What comes between the bull and bird—the simple act of ordering tea, and descriptions of the parents and the funeral director (“Her face was grim with practiced empathy”!)—takes on an electric poignancy as it guides readers deeper into the poem’s emotional transformation.

Throughout Path of Totality, Pollari pushes herself toward empirical, sensual experience, only to flinch, turn, or leap from it as she reaches for conclusions. Here’s the whole first paragraph of “Love”:

Sometimes your love becomes too big to be contained by your own body, so you decide to have a baby. Your love expands from its container into this new, second container; love fills up the baby and you. When everything goes as it’s meant to go, the baby emerges and you can nestle together at home, letting the love envelop you. But if your baby dies, your love goes searching for someplace to go. It spreads and spreads, not finding its desired object, until it is a thin film that covers the entire world. This way, eventually, your love comes back to itself.

I don’t quite buy this, conceptually or emotionally. What I do buy is the action of this poet and this book of continually working out how grief feels. What I also notice, and wonder about, is Pollari’s apparent desire to systematize feeling. Later in “Love,” she describes “electric zaps throughout my body” after her baby’s death. Staring at a bird feeder on a fire escape, she writes, “I could lose hours that way. But the jolts would shock me back into the room.” This is testimony, but Pollari isn’t satisfied to stop there—she wants to draw a moral. Her sister, writes Pollari, also experienced “zaps” with her “live baby...right there at her breast…as if to remind her to be vigilant in love.” Like Ben Jonson’s assertion that his son was taken from him as a punishment for loving too much, Pollari’s moralizing feels conventional. Thankfully, like Jonson, she pushes further. After a digression regarding a pregnancy diary—and more lessons (true, if anodyne) having to do with “throw[ing] yourself wholeheartedly into loving” and loving “every detail”—Pollari moves the poem to its compelling climax, remarkable for its inconclusion:

In the night, overwhelmed, I held my husband or he held me. Sometimes I curled up and he wrapped his body around mine, and sometimes I pressed my front to his broad back. We were the same physical size for many weeks; he was losing weight, and I was still holding on to mine, my post-partum body watery and adjusting. We were containers, and we were waiting for our love to return.

This dramatization, this exposition, I certainly buy—and I believe it needed the build-up from the earlier series of commonplaces. Recognition, self-revision, revision from the poem’s earlier, easier conclusions—these are what teach me how one might get grief’s swerving intensities, its terrible anomies, its jumbled distractions, and even its astonishments, just right on the page.