The much longed-for ghost at the heart of Ben Gallagher’s debut collection, A Grief Cave (Frontenac House Poetry, 2022), is the poet’s deceased partner, Zoë Nudell, who died suddenly a decade ago. Comprised of thirty poems and an essay, the book explores this unfathomable loss not as a moment to recover and move on from, but as something to be carried through life, the lost beloved remaining “not alive exactly but present” (“Small Sonnet with Night Visitor”). So the speaker lives with, in, and through his grief, the movement of which proves cyclical rather than linear: “this quest I thought I was on / turns out it’s a cycle” (“Time Says Otherwise”). This kind of aphoristic phrasing is common in the collection, well earned through the poet’s careful observation of his inner and outer worlds.
Divided into four titled sections (“No One Knows Alone,” “Before We Begin,” “Shadowdad,” and “Time Says Otherwise”), A Grief Cave follows the speaker from his initial loss to new love and fatherhood. As time moves, the speaker morphs, changed by his relationship with his new partner, Brinleigh—
—while Zoë’s memory remains constant, conjured unexpectedly through “A single hair / years later in a box of clothing” (“My Persephone”), and even in the speaker’s own body:
“Involuntarily (Wildly Constant)”
Gallagher’s collection is informed not only by his lived experience of loss and grief, but by other poets and Zen wisdom (this becomes obvious in the essay “Where Do Babies Come From?” which incorporates quotations from these sources). These ways of knowing come together to illustrate the essential nature of grief and ceremony:
Appropriately, Gallagher’s poems bear formal markers of ceremony, such as repetition, direct address, affective exclamations, questions, and sonorous word pairings like “form/firm,” “home/hone,” and “wave/wane” (“Form of Losing”). Perhaps because of these attributes, reading A Grief Cave feels like entering a conversation, and an experience in the fullest sense of the word, intense and somatic, inviting focused consideration and re-readings.
Annick MacAskill is the author Shadow Blight (Gaspereau Press, 2022), shortlisted for the Pat Lowther Memorial Award and the J.M. Abraham Award (Atlantic Book Awards), and winner of the Governor General’s Award for Poetry, as well as two other full-length collections and a chapbook. A settler of French and Scottish ancestry, she lives in Kjipuktuk (Halifax), on the unceded territory of the Mi’kmaq, where she spends her time teaching, writing, and translating.
Read Annick MacAskill's poems in Issue 296 (Summer Poetry 2023)
