Search

Although as a response to the New Cross and Grenfell Tower fires Jay Bernard's collection Surge (2019) engages with the themes of loss and mourning, no critical attempt has been made to approach this complex sequence of poems from the perspective of the poetic elegy. This paper argues that reading Surge as a neo-elegy sheds light on Bernard's intervention in current discourses on the grievability of Black lives in order to carry out their work of mournful protest. I intend to show the ways in which Surge endorses and enhances the ethico-political purpose and innovative expansiveness – regarding time, voice, and place – that characterize the contemporary Black elegy to address the past and ongoing struggles of the Black British community. Even if rooted in British postcolonial history, Bernard's project in Surge resonates with the concerns of the Black Lives Matter global movement and the body of Black elegiac poetry developing around it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is an a/r/tographic (artist/researcher/teacher) study through autobiographical close readings of several poems as a means to understand death within what the author calls eternal poetic time. Moving beyond the author's childhood's static image of death, the paper suggests that the ephemeral nature of life is not something to fear, but makes living more beautiful and eternal through the making and sharing of poetry and art. This paper is the first part of a three-paper study, which includes original poetry by the author. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay argues that "The lamentacion of a Gentilwoman vpon the death of her late deceased frend William Gruffith Gent." in The Gorgeous Gallery of Gallant Inventions (1578), attributed to Isabella Whitney, is a witty reimagining of one of the most popular Renaissance literary genres: the epitaph. The poet's grief revolves around the personal consequences of her secret lover's death, handling stock phrases and situational irony to strangely moving effect. While the poem's first-person speaker invokes the epitaph only to repudiate it, the three quatrains framing the text (written in the third person and therefore generally attributed to the volume's editor Thomas Proctor), pins down the mourning presence with the epitaphic "here." This paper suggests single authorship of the doubled text by showing how the poem posits personal lament as the site of interment located by the spatial demonstrative "here," to fashion a poetics of closure in which the voice of the languishing female poet becomes, through linguistic and textual splitting, a living epitaph for the dead beloved. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The death of a loved one can create a tear in the fabric of meaning. Grieving involves remaking meaning. In therapy, events can be emplotted into stories, which can return some sense of coherence to the bereaved. In this paper, I present a way of narrating loss through a narrative therapy approach of retelling. This involved writing found poems, known as rescued speech poems, from the conversations of people who had lost a loved partner. The found poetry sought to bring an order to grieving and to polish the beauty of key moments following loss. For one participant, the found poetry amplified a narrative of the biography of the loved one. For another, the poems added beauty to a memory of her deceased partner. Thus, rescued speech poems—judiciously selected from speech, and sensitively arranged on the page—can provide another way to facilitate vibrant meaning-making of life after loss. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Grief scholars have concurred that continuing bonds with the deceased represent normal adaptive behaviour in the face of loss, and numerous researchers have stressed the therapeutic benefits of writing through trauma; however, few have interrogated the potential therapeutic effects specific to elegy writing, which offers robust opportunities to express and transfigure grief through imagery and recollection. This research reveals the role of elegy writing in acknowledging and nurturing ongoing bonds with lost others. Drawing on critical debates surrounding the grief process, it examines case studies derived from adult writing workshops using poems by students working through loss to uncover ways elegy writing can assuage even difficult feelings like guilt and resentment, which often complicate the grieving process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]