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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]

While clients embark of journeys of discovery when participating in counselling, a counsellor is also discovering which processes in counselling potentially facilitate change. In this paper, I present one research finding: that offering a client a found poem which featured resonant images from their own talk could enhance meaning-making by them. Drawing on Bachelard (1969b), this approach can be considered thera-poiesis. In my counsellor practitioner research, I engaged eight bereaved people in individual therapeutic conversations about how their lost loved spouse or partner still contributes to their life. In my listening, I paid attention to resonant images in their talk, wrote these as found poetry, and offered this poetry to each participant. In this paper, focusing on one participant's image of the 'bubbling life force', I show the meaning making potential for the client of a counsellor's highlighting of a resonant image. I argue that one engine of change in counselling may be the generative potential of language itself, and the artful replication of resonant images in particular. [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]