In her first collection for adults, renowned children's author Jane Yolen limns her experience with loss in straightforward and clear lyrics. The poems' simplicity makes them all the more poignant; she depicts her experience, including the mundane tasks following a death (packing up clothes, buying a headstone) plainly, unobstructed by wordplay. Though it contains nothing new or surprising about the grieving process, the book is finely wrought.
She writes of her husband's absence: "[It] breaks me open every morning, / splitting me like a well-placed wedge." But the poems are restrained and well crafted. Sadness rendered beautiful: "The hem of my heart wears the same frost."
The rare raw moments are mostly in the poems about her husband's final days. They spare none of the grim details of caring for a cancer patient. "The Good Wife," which mentions cleaning her husband's rear, emptying the bedpan, and purchasing Tucks, also reveals her own bitterness:
"No, the good wife does it all alone,
Then lies down on the pyre
Next to her dearly beloved
And goes up with him in a pure blaze to heaven."
She writes about her wild desperate attempts to get her husband to eat and offers the startling image of "Cancer like some tin-hat dictator/ Forbidding you your life."