Review: A Ritual of Drowning

A Ritual of Drowning - Poems of Love and Mourning
by Teya Schaffer
Tabor Sarah Books, 1999, Oakland and Palo Alto
Reviewed by Lee Anne Phillips <leeanne@leeanne.com>
How many ways can a heart break and yet be mended? In this heartrending but essential collection by Teya Schaffer, grief is examined in raw, searing detail and transformed into the highest art. I was reminded of Jane Yolen's Cards of Grief by the power and beauty of the whole and reduced to helpless tears by many of the individual parts. Is this a lamentation? A love story? Or some of both? Or perhaps even a paean of praise. It starts, thankfully, with a strong statement of reconciliation that helps us through the rough spots to come as we prepare to follow Teya through her lover's final illness and death.
i
It is not like drowning any more:
your life no longer a silent film
flickering before my eyes.
No, now you are wrapped like a holy text
over arm and forehead, enscrolled
on the doorposts of my house,
a commandment of remembrance.
from Closure
How can we not respond to such high praise? We ask for peace and life but are guaranteed neither. If our thoughts drift from a familiar path yet the path is there, just over there, and we can hear the echo of millenia, an eternity, of mourning in these words. We are about to be carried away into a strange land, the land of death and grief, but first we hear a single, beautiful voice lifted up in haunting song.

From the dreadful words that Jackie Winnow's cancer has metastasized, Teya leaves little unexamined, not the pain, the deep estrangement, the leaving behind, not even her own guilty thoughts as her lover is dying.

I purchase her birthday gift wondering
how soon I'll wear it.
Her Valentine's Day card burns my fingers:
When this you see/Remember me.
from A Valentine
We are carried along on Teya's path, intimately involved in the venal business of dying, of picking out the casket, of the process of death itself; dealing with the body, the washing, the re-clothing of our naked selves in the garments of the grave. She spares herself nothing, not the dark memories, not even our hasty, nervous complicity with the inevitable letting go.
Without warning
her name disappears.
People shy
from the syllables
which formed her.
from Bones
The early days of loss are here as we enter the almost decade spanned by the poems in this book, the aching need, the familiar ghostly presence, and the foolish poignant hope laid bare, as bare as bones displayed.
Even the cemetery can not persuade me;
on my way home I see the mail truck
and my steps quicken.
You have never been away so long
without writing.
from Disbelief
What can we say to people who have known real grief without betraying our own profound ignorance? What comfort can we give that doesn't simultaneously belittle or demean the memory of love, of the lover, and of life. Our efforts to console the mourner are so often shallow and inappropriate, so pretentiously contrary to experience and sense, and so ultimately inhumane. But when we hear her as she addresses her lost lover, her passion burns through the page and leaves us mute:
... Happy! they say
you and the others gone before
smile, while I strain through time
for the comfort of you alive
and never so cruel as that.
from Faith
But grieving evolves into acceptance, into community with the mourners who stand beside you, into something which makes us more alive and glad to be alive. Teya shows us each breath newly sweet, the burgeoning power of life so awesome as to be uncanny, almost fey, and the memory of her belovéd something precious, a gift from the past to the present as she gets on with the tasks of living with something in her heart like a scar, a wound, or maybe even more like a window.
The dead are not in our hearts.
We call their names out loud
precisely because they are not there.
from Stepping Off the Curb
In reading these poems, you must be prepared to weep. For weeping we part from those we love most dearly. But you must also be prepared to have your heart pierced and exalted by Teya's bittersweet love. For love is not destroyed by loss but by forgetting. Grief changes as does the body and is itself transformed and made anew in the aftermath of death. Where memory remains then love abides forever and our deaths are shared by those who love us as surely as were our lives, incorporated into their changing selves like the air and water which nourish and sustain us. Drink deep. This cup will not be offered twice.
I am only sister to the I
who shared a death
and died.
from Content, Language, Poem
And now we come full circle, back to the hymn of praise, of naming, and of loving remembrance, back to where we started as life, love, and death must always riverrun.
what if death is unceasing
there are other things
which last as long
from Closure

Review Copyright © 1999, by Lee Anne Phillips <leeanne@leeanne.com> - All Rights Reserved Worldwide

Poem excerpts are from A Ritual of Drowning - Poems of Love and Mourning Copyright © 1999 by Teya Schaffer - All Rights Reserved Worldwide

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