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.”

PHOTOGRAPH BY BEN DEAN

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

in “Babel” tells her dead husband, “I search for / the language I can speak with you,” she remains committed to articulating not only human vulnerability and sorrow but also humanity’s resilience, its capacity to surmount the gravest loss. “Let Us Mourn like the Victorians” employs marked hyperbole to warn poet and reader alike to resist self-abandonment to grief, while the book’s penultimate poem, “Listening to Beethoven’s Ninth the Summer after You Died,” refers to this symphony as the composer’s “anthem to humanity,” containing as it does Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy” inspired by Schiller’s poem of the same title.

Shearin’s reference to Beethoven’s last complete symphony is one of her book’s many allusions and historical references that enrich its portrait of loss, extending that portrait beyond the personal to the archetypal and universal. Plunged suddenly into widowhood, the poet recognizes in “Glass Piano” that “the language of widows . . . is diluvian.” She likewise emphasizes the ancient roots of grief in her rather unwieldy title “Poem in Which I Make a Cave Painting of Our Life Together,” a poem that includes the poignant line, “I am mixing my paint with ash.” Shearin draws from fairy tale, history, and myth for images of love and marriage, mortality and abandonment and longing: the lost Gretel, the dancing plague of 1518, sailors shipwrecked in “the graveyard of the Atlantic,” marooned aviator Amelia Earhart, Isis’s piecing together and resurrecting of Osiris, Psyche’s fraught marriage to Cupid, Odysseus’s visit to the Underworld, the Gaelic harvest festival of Samhain, when “the boundaries between this world / and the Otherworld opened” (in “The Day of the Dead”), a festival whose dates nearly coincide with the dates of Shearin’s husband’s heart attack (October 31) and death (November 2). Through such references the poet enlarges the scope of her vision, reminding readers of our temporal–and all too temporary–existence, encouraging us to embrace love and human connection as antidotes to the ravages of time.

Lest readers assume, incorrectly, that Shearin’s poems are overly allusive, let me hasten to stress the clarity and directness of most of her writing. Perhaps the book’s second poem, “Math,” written in the two-line stanzas she favors in nearly half the collection’s poems, will illustrate:

I was asked to tabulate a number based on a life stress inventory and you know

how bad I am at math; I thought of your father drawing a circle on the chalkboard of our

high school geometry class, his hand like dust. I received 100 points

because you died and another 28 because our daughter started college,

20 for our new apartment, 30 because I have trouble sleeping and eating.

I remembered you at 24: your age when we promised till death do us part;

your life was already half over when you danced with me beneath

white balloons; I have been counting those balloons in our album

of wedding photographs where they drift out the door of the reception hall

into a cypress forest heavy with moss. You were 30 when our daughter was born,

and she was 18 when you died at 48, and your father would have said

all of these are even numbers: divisible by 2 with no remainder.

COURTESY OF FAITH SHEARIN

The striking extended metaphor of the life stress inventory and the other numerals used in this poem unify the text as it builds toward its haunting final line. Perhaps Shearin’s penchant for two-line stanzas in Lost Language is meant to remind readers of the contrasting decoupling of wife from husband caused by his death, for her marriage no longer mirrors such pairings.

Shearin offers an abundance of other apt metaphors and images for the emotions she experiences as a bereft spouse. Several of the poems focus on animals of various kinds rather than on her personal loss. “Animals in Space,” for instance, presents various creatures caught up in events they neither willed nor wanted. “They never meant to be passengers / or astronauts,” the poem begins, “never meant to experience // weightlessness.” A similar sense of powerlessness and insubstantiality besets the poet. Likewise, in “Early Lab Mice” Shearin recounts scientist Robert Koch’s experiments with anthrax, narrowing her lens at poem’s end to the imagined perspective of the mice, animals “sensing danger, discovery,” although not a discovery that will benefit them but rather a discovery like that of the ship’s passengers in “The Iceberg That Sank the Titanic,” more than 1500 of whom died.

Occasionally, Shearin falls under the spell of an image or metaphor and repeats it more often than seems advisable. Early in the book, for example, she speaks of her husband as having vanished “into the white rafters // of the afterlife” (in “Keeping Warm”), a vivid phrase initially but one whose impact diminishes when it occurs again (with the adjective “white” omitted). She is likewise drawn to metaphors involving the word “pages” so that readers encounter “the pages of the afterlife” (“Afterlife”), “the pages of afternoon” (“Hammock”), and “the pages of winter” (“Janet”). Far more effective is the metaphor she uses in “Horse Latitudes” to describe the waves along the graveyard of the Atlantic, “where the ocean grows a thousand manes.”

Despite such quibbles and despite Shearin’s tendency to overuse one-line stanzas to end her poems (well over a third of the poems conclude in this fashion), Lost Language is a deeply moving, diverse, thought-provoking collection. The poet’s ultimate stance is that of survivor, not victim. Her poems probe the pain of bereavement and abandonment while simultaneously attending to life’s pleasures and wonders that persist amid intense trauma. For Shearin, I suspect, composing this book provided her a version of the mythical Greek drug Nepenthes, an antidote to sorrow mentioned in Homer’s Odyssey that also serves as the title of one of her poems. Shearin’s book invokes not a “drug of / forgetfulness” (“Nepenthes”), however, but one that enhances memory; it defends against sorrow by recalling and celebrating the beloved. She thus concludes the collection by continuing to address her vanished husband: “Wait for me in the Underworld,” she urges; “tell me whether you / are living in Elysium or Asphodel meadows” (“Wait for Me”). “I am your widow,” she declares, embracing an identity thrust upon her by his death. n

ABOVE A selfie of the poet and her husband at Sam and Omie’s restaurant on the Outer Banks, 2016 NORTH CAROLINA WRITERS: Submit your books to the annual North Carolina book awards, given by the North Carolina Literary and Historical Association and affiliates. Find eligibility and submission guidelines here. Due annually on July 15.