Book Announcement: Grief Mends, 31 Poems About Grief
It’s strange how this one started. I was stuck, needing to move forward creatively, personally, and professionally. I kept hunting around for the next step. When you’ve spent a lot of time moving though grief, and recovering from being a caregiver, you might find yourself thinking about what the next step could be from time to time.
The answer was always the same: write more poetry.
Not the answer I was hoping for. I’ve written poetry since I was very young, it’s always come easy for me. It has not shown itself to be a tool to launch me forward in life. Yet here it sits, at the center of all my writing.
First I gave myself the assignment of writing one poem a day for thirty days, post it somewhere public, no excuses - NO apologies. It felt good. I started waking up early, rolling over to start a new poem. I might work on it through the day and publish at night, or it might be polished enough by dawn. Some of them I liked quite a bit. A few of them show up in this book of poems.
After I finished I was still hungry to write more, and I knew what was next. Though poetry and grief are natural companions to me, I haven’t found the wealth of good poetry on this topic that I’d expected. It was time for me to dig in deeper, give myself another assignment. 30 poems was not enough, for some reason I needed just one more.
Grief does mend us and it leads us to an inner terrain we are not encouraged to visit in our daily lives. Most of us need to be called there by the pull of something truly significant. Once there we need not feel ourselves to be alone or completely without compass, we are not. That terrain is not really ours alone. It belongs to the entirety of humanity, and a few other species as well. We may not see the footprints of others there, but we walk on them with every step.
Should you choose to buy this book I trust you’ll carry it with you, if you visit that place. The journey there is incredibly challenging in so many ways, but we don’t have to fear it. There are fires there to sit around, and even a few good travelers to meet along the way. You might make a poem or two of your own to share with others. It’s always good to have an offering of some kind with you, when you travel in places like that.
It’s available now for download on blurb.com . https://www.blurb.com/b/12184601-grief-mends
Below are links to a few of the poems I shared here as short videos:
