Chasing Wild Grief

“Unfolding the map of my unknowing,” a line from Sandra Lindow’s lovely elegiac collection, Chasing Wild Grief, provides an entry point as any to the heartfelt, at times heart-wrenching, but ultimately heartening poems in a book that remembers, mourns, and richly illuminates the life of a beloved companion. Although highly detailed and rich in natural imagery, the tone and language of these poems carry us across the landscape of “wild grief,” prompting readers to recall the inevitable partings from their own lives, accomplishing this in a variety of forms and language that finally leave us more celebratory than sorrowful. These poems, like all good elegies, not only navigate the various modes of grief, but ultimately accomplish what the poetry of memory at its best seeks to accomplish, transforming grief into gratitude.

—Max Garland, former Poet Laureate of Wisconsin and author of The Word We Used for It

With meticulously ordered “consecutive candles,” brilliant manipulation of form and strategic use of empty space, Lindow compels us to embrace life before, during, and after the death of a beloved. Subtle. Raw. Authentic. A forced exploration, “. . . each / step turned salt by unshed tears, going / home, unknowing where that is,” leading us “. . . past the bedrock of mythology into the plate / tectonics of the aching subterranean world.” But she doesn’t stop there. She brings herself, and us, back into the realms of hope and living with “. . . ghost / shoes, high stepping into the air.” I read these poems again and again, loving them, and her, and Michael — and life and love itself — more each time. Loving deeply makes us vulnerable. We must. We must.

—Laurel Winter, World Fantasy and Rhysling award-winning author of Growing Wings and the often anthologized “egg horror poem”

These poems speak with quiet reverence for life, death, and the possibilities of renewal, skillfully weaving the natural world and its leavings and rebirths with the ethereal world of loss. Deftly written, her language is lush. She pays attention to how words work together — sound, rhythm, or both. The spiraling DNA of her villanelles and pantoums as well as her artful concrete poems make this collection illuminating instead of sad. These are exquisite poems from a book I’ll read again and again.

—Karla Huston, Wisconsin Poet Laureate 2017–18. Author of Grief Bone and A Theory of Lipstick

A splendid fierceness weaves throughout this extraordinary collection of poems about nature, and the nature of grief. Trees become “knotted tibia trunks and phalanges of oak, arbor vitae, and Norway Pine,” and a lakeshore becomes backdrop for “water’s feral fecundity.” Lindow establishes her prosodic dexterity in “The Great Unknowing,” a heart-wrenching villanelle about the aftermath of loss, and a scattering of shaped poems give the entire collection an additional dimension. These poems clearly do not seek a palliative for grief, but reveal it as it is: “huge and omnipresent . . . sucking marrow from the bones of the day.”

—Marilyn L. Taylor, former Wisconsin Poet Laureate and author of Step on a Crack