Time of Grief

Time of Grief: Mourning Poems presents a wide-ranging selection
of poets from classical to modern times writing on themes of grief and
loss, death and mourning. Reaffirming poetry’s ancient and intimate link
to ritual, this little anthology unfolds as a series of forty-nine
stations, or points of reflection and meditation. Each station — a poem
or series of poems —explores and engages with the suspended, in-between
state of bereavement. What the poets in this volume seek is a solace
paradoxically within and beyond words. Their elegies try to make sense
of the pain and emptiness common to grief. Readers will encounter recent
Nobel Prize winner Tomas Transtromer’s epiphanic clarity,the immortal
words of Li Ch’ing-chao and Zeami, Marina Tsvetaeva’s eulogy to Boris
Pasternak, Mallarme’s anguished lines for his son, Neruda’s praise-song
to his friend, Rilke’s requiem, William Bronk’s transcendental fugue.