Output details

a

a is a three-part book of poems documenting the sudden loss of my partner. The aim of the project was to find forms of expression for the sense of absence and loss which follows the death of a loved one. Rather than writing an elegy in remembrance of who I had lost, I wanted to write a project which tracked the loss itself.

The first section, ‘interior’, is a series of abstract prose poems based on objects my partner left behind in our flat. This section was inspired by Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons, and in its abstraction of everyday objects attempts to work through the relationship between the triviality of material objects and the intensity of feeling they evoke in context.

The second section, ‘geometries’, is an experimental sonnet cycle. Through the ten sonnets, I attempted to rein in what would otherwise perhaps become disordered or sentimental reflections upon the grieving process through the application of traditional form and metre. In order to amplify the restrictions I placed upon my writing process, the sonnets are formatted as square boxes, implying a formal and thematic ordering of grief.

The final section, ‘disorder’, is an attempt to document the sundering of the psyche that occurs during acute grief. I created a series of collage poems out of the images and notes I had collected during my initial conception of the project. The notes come from critical writing about death and absence as well as my own reflections upon the grieving process.

The text holds these three perspectives on grief and absence (with three discrete writing processes) in tension with each other. My intention was that they could be read separately, as three accounts, or together, in order to form an accumulative poetic account of the grieving process.