The art of losing: poems of grief and healing

Introduction

Part 1: Reckoning

Between grief and nothing, I will take grief

Musee des Beaux Arts / W H Auden

Dying / Robert Pinsky

Wake / Rita Dove

After great pain, a formal feeling comes

My life closed twice before its close

/ Emily Dickinson

Secret knowledge

Much hurrying / Brenda Hillman

Race / Sharon Olds

Whale / Terrance Hayes

Silence / D H Lawrence

Futility / Wilfred Owen

Lament / Anne Sexton

Not waving but drowning / Stevie Smith

Do not go gentle into that good night / Dylan Thomas

Pyrrhic victory / Lucie Brock-Broido

Mower / Philip Larkin

No more / Mary Jo Bang

Loss / Ruth Stone

Ever / Brenda Shaughnessy

Sudden / Nick Flynn

Do not pick up the telephone / Ted Hughes

Funeral blues / W H Auden

Graveyard blues / Natasha Trethewey

Without / Donald Hall

For a woman dead at thirty / Jean Valentine

Final Notations / Adrienne Rich

One continuous substance / Albert Goldbarth

Iron / Jane Cooper

Bereavement / Kevin Young

This hour and what is dead / Li-Young Lee

Carrion comfort / Gerard Manley Hopkins

From choir practice / Forrest Hamer

To Bhain Campbell

Epilogue / John Berryman

Sea canes / Derek Walcott

Autumn passage / Elizabeth Alexander

Let evening come / Jane Kenyon

Part 2: Regret

I believe, but what is belief?

Nothing gold can stay / Robert Frost

Spots / Joel Brouwer

Like / Frank Bidart

Dreaming of the dead / Anne Stevenson

Grief / Stephen Dobyns

Elegy for Jane / Theodore Roethke

On the death of friends in childhood / Donald Justice

Shout / Simon Armitage

We assume: on the death of our son, Reuben Masai Harper / Michael S Harper

Written on the due date of a son never born / David Wojahn

Stillbirth / Laure-Anne Bosselaar

Mid-term break / Seamus Heaney

Litany / Gregory Orr

How some of it happened / Marie Howe

Freedom, New Hampshire / Galway Kinnell

Ice / Mary Oliver

Last hellos / Les Murray

Oh antic God / Lucille Clifton

Speaking to my dead mother / Ruth Stone

Reassurance / Thom Gunn

My sister, who died young, takes up the task / Jon Pineda

Elegy for my father / Mark Strand

Men at my father's funeral / William Matthews

On the death of a colleague / Stephen Dunn

Marquee moon / Jeff Fallis

Facts of grief / Jim Daniels

David Lemieux / Denise Duhamel

Dirge without music / Edna St Vincent Millay.

Part 3: Remembrance

What did I know, what did I know

After / Elizabeth Alexander

Poems for my brother Kenneth / Owen Dodson

Artifact / Claudia Emerson

Remember me / Hal Sirowitz

Death is a woman / Joy Harjo

Tiara / Mark Doty

Memorial: son Bret / William Stafford

Morning baking / Carolyn Forche

Hand me down blues / Calvin Forbes

Grief / C K Williams

Myth / Natasha Trethewey

Bones of my father / Etheridge Knight

Song / Joseph Brodsky

Those winter Sundays / Robert Hayden

Asked for a happy memory of her father, she recalls Wrigley Field / Beth Ann Fennelly

Forgiving my father / Lucille Clifton

White crane / Dean Young

Elegy / Arnold J Kemp

Cosmos, late blooming / D A Powell

Abiku / Afaa Michael Weaver

Lost pilot / James Tate

Refusal to mourn the death, by fire, of a child in London / Dylan Thomas

Luke and the duct tape / Coleman Barks

Birthday poem / Erin Murphy

You don't miss your water / Cornelius Eady

Dead / Billy Collins

Part 4: Ritual

Tomorrow, the bowl I have yet to fill

Water / Philip Larkin

My religion / Anne Carson

Truth the dead know / Anne Sexton

Listen Lord: a prayer / James Weldon Johnson

Dedication for a plot of ground / William Carlos Williams

Facing it / Yusef Komunyakaa

Funeral rites / Seamus Heaney

Not forgotten / Toi Derricotte

After your death / Natasha Trethewey

Disposal / W D Snodgrass

Seersucker suit / Deborah Digges

Until she returns / Reginald Shepherd

Oboe in Handel's largo from Xerxes as elegy / Quan Barry

Transaction / A R Ammons

My father's body / William Matthews

My mother's body, my professor, my bower / Jean Valentine

Dead letters / Mary Jo Salter

I needed to talk to my sister / Grace Paley

Fatal April / Thomas Sayers Ellis

Celestial music / Louise Gluck

God / Michael Ryan

Trying to pray / James Wright

Ice storm / Robert Hayden

Wasteful gesture only not / Tony Hoagland

Blues procession / Terrance Hayes

I just wanna testify / Cornelius Eady

Incensation at the funeral / Matthew Rohrer

My father's funeral / Karl Shapiro

Cold calls / Edward Hirsch

Burial [no woman no cry] / Kevin Young

Mourners / Ted Kooser

Lament / Louise Gluck

Request / Lawrence Raab

Elegy / Meghan O'Rourke

Translation / Franz Wright

Storm valediction / Campbell McGrath

One art / Elizabeth Bishop

Prayer / Galway Kinnell

Part 5: Recovery

I learn by going where I have to go

My heart / Frank O'Hara

Poem / Simon Armitage

Gilded shadow / Jane Mayhall

On new terms / Deborah Garrison

For the anniversary of my death / W S Merwin

Hum / Ann Lauterbach

Try to praise the mutilated world translated by Clare Cavanagh / Adam Zagajewski

Grief / Matthew Dickman

My father, in heaven, is reading out loud / Li-Young Lee

Vigil / Phillis Levin

Practice / Ellen Bryant Voigt

Re: happiness, in pursuit thereof / C D Wright

Light turnouts / John Ashbery

Living alone (II) / Denise Levertov

Beach roses / Mark Doty

Death poem / Kim Addonizio

Infirm / Gwendolyn Brooks

It is what it is / Paul Muldoon

12/19/02

David Leham

Weeds and peonies / Donald Hall

Lilacs / Richard Wilbur

Father / Ted Kooser

After my death / David Young

Lucky life / Gerald Stern

Wait / Galway Kinnell

Wild geese / Mary Oliver

Waking / Theodore Roethke.

Part 6: Redemption

What will survive of us in love

Trees / Philip Larkin

In the city of light / Larry Levis

Death shall have no Dominion / Dylan Thomas

What are years? / Marianne Moore

First Psalm / Anne Sexton

Evening / Charles Simic

Grasses translated by Coleman Barks / Rumi

Redemption song / Kevin Young

From the Clay Hill anthology / Hayden Carruth

When death comes / Mary Oliver

I thank you God for most this amazing / E E Cummings

Unsolicited survey / Phillis Levin

Yet the books translated by Czeslaw Milosz and Robert Hass / Czeslaw Milosz

Last words / James Merrill

Music is in the piano only when it is played / Jack Gilbert

Coda / Jason Shinder

Litany / Aracelis Girmay

Notes from the other side / Jane Kenyon

Self-portrait / Charles Wright

Mother / Anne Stevenson

Did this ever happen to you / Franz Wright

Arundel tomb / Philip Larkin

Poem for a survivor / Donald Justice

Letter from God / Ruth L Schwartz

Otherwise / Jane Kenyon

To breath / Kenneth Koch

Train ride / Ruth Stone

Acknowledgments

Index by subject.