NORTH CAROLINA L I T E R A R Y RE V I E W
Winter 2022
PHOTOGRAPH BY BEN DEAN
68
CHARTING GRIEF, SEEKING SOLACE a review by John Lang Faith Shearin. Lost Language: Poems. Press 53, 2020.
JOHN LANG is an English Professor Emeritus at Emory & Henry College in Emory, VA, where he taught from 1983 to 2012. He is the author of Understanding Fred Chappell (University of South Carolina Press, 2000), Six Poets from the Mountain South (Louisiana State University Press, 2010), and Understanding Ron Rash (University of South Carolina Press, 2014; reviewed in NCLR Online 2017), as well as the editor of Appalachia and Beyond: Conversations with Writers from the Mountain South (University of Tennessee Press, 2006), a collection of interviews from The Iron Mountain Review, which he edited for more than twenty years. FAITH SHEARIN grew up in Kitty Hawk, NC. She is the author of six previous books of poetry, most recently Darwin’s Daughter (Stephen F. Austin University Press, 2018). She has received awards from Yaddo, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund, and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. She has been a visiting writer at American University, Carver Center for the Arts, and Interlochen Center for the Arts. Her poems have been featured on The Writer’s Almanac more than thirty times and included several times in former US Poet Laureate Ted Kooser’s syndicated column, “American Life in Poetry.”
Lost Language, North Carolina native Faith Shearin’s seventh collection of poems, maps a landscape of grief following her husband’s sudden death at age forty-eight from a massive coronary caused by a congenital heart valve defect. The couple had been married for two dozen years. Shearin traces the varied calculus of loss in seventyeight poems, most no longer than a page, though ten run to two pages. Fifty of the poems are addressed to her deceased husband, Thomas J. Murdock (1970–2018), to whom the book is dedicated, as the poet negotiates the new circumstances of her life, “each doorknob a strange planet // in my hand” (“Navigation”). The volume’s title poem, placed near the book’s center, finds the poet remarking to her husband, “I am the last // native
speaker of the language / of our marriage,” and language is a major motif throughout the collection. In “Death in Other Countries,” for example, Shearin explores the diverse idioms different languages use to speak of the dead: not English’s “pushing up daisies” but French’s “eating dandelions / by the roots” or German’s “looking at the radishes / from below.” In “I Heard the Cardinals This Morning,” one of the book’s very best poems, Shearin listens to the birds while reading a textbook written for Germans who are trying to learn English. The italicized sentences quoted from that text move subtly through assorted verb tenses and moods, ending powerfully with, “I may borrow a book / from the library. He may never come home.” Although in this poem Shearin indicates that “I only speak / grief,” and
