Introduction |
I. Reckoning | Between grief and nothing, I will take grief. |
W. H. Auden | Muse des Beaux Arts |
Robert Pinsky | Dying |
Rita Dove | The Wake |
Emily Dickinson | After great pain, a formal feeling comes |
My life closed twice before its close |
Brenda Hillman | Secret Knowledge |
Much Hurrying |
Sharon Olds | The Race |
Terrance Hayes | The Whale |
D. H. Lawrence | Silence |
Wilfred Owen | Futility |
Anne Sexton | Lament |
Stevie Smith | Not Waving But Drowning |
Dylan Thomas | Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night |
Lucie Brock-Broido | Pyrrhic Victory |
Philip Larkin | The Mower |
Mary Jo Bang | No More |
Ruth Stone | Loss |
Brenda Shaughnessy | Ever |
Nick Flynn | Sudden |
Ted Hughes | Do Not Pick Up the Telephone |
W. H. Auden | Funeral Blues |
Natasha Trethewey | Graveyard Blues |
Donald Hall | Without |
Jean Valentine | For a Woman Dead at Thirty |
Adrienne Rich | Final Notations |
Albert Goldbarth | One Continuous Substance |
Jane Cooper | Iron |
Kevin Young | Bereavement |
Li-Young Lee | This Hour and What Is Dead |
Gerard Manley Hopkins | [Carrion Comfort] |
Forrest Hamer | from Choir Practice |
John Berryman | To Bhain Campbell |
Epilogue |
Derek Walcott | Sea Canes |
Elizabeth Alexander | Autumn Passage |
Jane Kenyon | Let Evening Come |
II. Regret | I believe, but what is belief? |
Robert Frost | Nothing Gold Can Stay |
Joel Brouwer | The Spots |
Frank Bidart | Like |
Anne Stevenson | Dreaming of the Dead |
Stephen Dobyns | Grief |
Theodore Roethke | Elegy for Jane |
Donald Justice | On the Death of Friends in Childhood |
Simon Armitage | The Shout |
Michael S. Harper | We Assume: On the Death of Our Son, Reuben Masai Harper |
David Wojahn | Written on the Due Date of a Son Never Born |
Laure-Anne Bosselaar | Stillbirth |
Seamus Heaney | Mid-Term Break |
Gregory Orr | A Litany |
Marie Howe | How Some of It Happened |
Galway Kinnell | Freedom, New Hampshire |
Mary Oliver | Ice |
Les Murray | The Last Hellos |
Lucille Clifton | oh antic God |
Ruth Stone | Speaking to My Dead Mother |
Thom Gunn | The Reassurance |
Jon Pineda | My Sister, Who Died Young, Takes Up the Task |
Mark Strand | Elegy for My Father |
William Matthews | Men at My Fathers Funeral |
Stephen Dunn | On the Death of a Colleague |
Jeff Fallis | Marquee Moon |
Jim Daniels | The Facts of Grief |
Denise Duhamel | David Lemieux |
Edna St. Vincent Millay | Dirge Without Music |
III. Remembrance | What did I know, what did I know |
Elizabeth Alexander | After |
Owen Dodson | Poems for My Brother Kenneth |
Claudia Emerson | Artifact |
Hal Sirowitz | Remember Me |
Joy Harjo | Death Is a Woman |
Mark Doty | Tiara |
William Stafford | A Memorial: Son Bret |
Carolyn Forch | The Morning Baking |
Calvin Forbes | Hand Me Down Blues |
C. K. Williams | Grief |
Natasha Trethewey | Myth |
Etheridge Knight | The Bones of My Father |
Joseph Brodsky | A Song |
Robert Hayden | Those Winter Sundays |
Beth Ann Fennelly | Asked for a Happy Memory of Her Father, She Recalls Wrigley Field |
Lucille Clifton | forgiving my father |
Dean Young | White Crane |
Arnold J. Kemp | Elegy |
D. A. Powell | cosmos, late blooming |
Afaa Michael Weaver | Abiku |
James Tate | The Lost Pilot |
Dylan Thomas | A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London |
Coleman Barks | Luke and the Duct Tape |
Erin Murphy | Birthday Poem |
Cornelius Eady | You Dont Miss Your Water |
Billy Collins | The Dead |
IV. Ritual | Tomorrow, the bowl I have yet to fill. |
Philip Larkin | Water |
Anne Carson | My Religion |
Anne Sexton | The Truth the Dead Know |
James Weldon Johnson | Listen Lord: A Prayer |
William Carlos Williams | Dedication for a Plot of Ground |
Yusef Komunyakaa | Facing It |
Seamus Heaney | Funeral Rites |
Toi Derricotte | Not Forgotten |
Natasha Trethewey | After Your Death |
W. D. Snodgrass | Disposal |
Deborah Digges | Seersucker Suit |
Reginald Shepherd | Until She Returns |
Quan Barry | the oboe in Handels largo from Xerxes as elegy |
A. R. Ammons | Transaction |
William Matthews | My Fathers Body |
Jean Valentine | My Mothers Body, My Professor, My Bower |
Mary Jo Salter | Dead Letters |
Grace Paley | I needed to talk to my sister |
Thomas Sayers Ellis | Fatal April |
Louise Glck | Celestial Music |
Michael Ryan | God |
James Wright | Trying to Pray |
Robert Hayden | Ice Storm |
Tony Hoagland | Wasteful Gesture Only Not |
Terrance Hayes | Blues Procession |
Cornelius Eady | I Just Wanna Testify |
Matthew Rohrer | Incensation at the Funeral |
Karl Shapiro | My Fathers Funeral |
Edward Hirsch | Cold Calls |
Kevin Young | Burial [No Woman No Cry] |