Writing from the Rough: Poems About Grief
Writing Sonnets for my Mother
When my mother suffered a heart attack and was given a few weeks to live, I knew immediately that I wanted to look after her, and to keep a record of the experience as a way of not losing her. I envisaged a series of sonnets that would be sparked-off from notes, on the hoof. I couldn’t have imagined how difficult they’d be to write, or how wonderful, or that it would be five years before they were completed.
I’d experienced bereavements before, each bringing that desperate need to write, to make sense, to create something new. When it came to writing the sonnets, however, there was one crucial difference: having my mother a few doors away and seeing her everyday changed my way of life. I had a day job, and a husband I didn’t want to sacrifice. It was an enormous responsibility, exhausting and at times overwhelming.
The demands of the sonnet seemed commensurate with the experience: it felt right that a difficult reality should be conveyed through a (for me) challenging form. Very often the struggle of writing the poem seemed to enact the tussle of my emotions and day-to-day practicalities. Many were ditched. It took several failed attempts to get the following sestet to mesh in terms of rhythm, rhyme and natural wording:
Now she’s self-deprecating with remorse.
She sits beside me, large, warm, expansive,
with all her thoughts and feelings in reverse.
I grapple with the key and stall the engine,
appalled at her predicament I grieve
for her and feel her misery as mine. (Out of Sorts)
Sometimes the demands of rhyme can compromise meaning:
My illness world was music, books and trains
on tracks across the bedroom floor. A Child’s
Garden of Verses and King Solomon’s Mines
were loyal friends: one tender, the other hostile. (Happiness)
I think it’s clear from the last line that the child loved both books: I’m trusting that ‘loyal friends’ conveys the opposition of the ‘cosiness’ of one book with the ‘scariness’ of the other, positively. But I’m aware that ‘hostile’ could be interpreted in a way I don’t intend, and hope one day to resolve this.
Occasionally intention, expression, metre and rhyme synchronize:
I had to pull against her gravity
to detach myself and not disintegrate.
No, not to abandon her or leave her alone,
just stop her pain and grief becoming my own.
But as my heart now bears a lighter weight,
my love’s a lesser love it seems to me. (Heart)
During these years my mother started singing French songs and nursery rhymes I’d never heard before. I was thrilled, wrote down and learned them so we could sing together. Some of these feature in the poems. And she loved hearing about my Chinese and Korean students, who also appear in the poems along with the positive presence of their mothers.
No life-long relationship is always sweet and I hope my poems don’t suggest that. I hope their lines and between-the-lines balance out.
Page(s) 26-27
magazine list
- Features
- zines
- 10th Muse
- 14
- Acumen
- Agenda
- Ambit
- Angel Exhaust
- ARTEMISpoetry
- Atlas
- Blithe Spirit
- Borderlines
- Brando's hat
- Brittle Star
- Candelabrum
- Cannon's Mouth, The
- Chroma
- Coffee House, The
- Dream Catcher
- Equinox
- Erbacce
- Fabric
- Fire
- Floating Bear, The
- French Literary Review, The
- Frogmore Papers, The
- Global Tapestry
- Grosseteste Review
- Homeless Diamonds
- Interpreter's House, The
- Iota
- Journal, The
- Lamport Court
- London Magazine, The
- Magma
- Matchbox
- Matter
- Modern Poetry in Translation
- Monkey Kettle
- Moodswing
- Neon Highway
- New Welsh Review
- North, The
- Oasis
- Obsessed with pipework
- Orbis
- Oxford Poetry
- Painted, spoken
- Paper, The
- Pen Pusher Magazine
- Poetry Cornwall
- Poetry London
- Poetry London (1951)
- Poetry Nation
- Poetry Review, The
- Poetry Salzburg Review
- Poetry Scotland
- Poetry Wales
- Private Tutor
- Purple Patch
- Quarto
- Rain Dog
- Reach Poetry
- Review, The
- Rialto, The
- Second Aeon
- Seventh Quarry, The
- Shearsman
- Smiths Knoll
- Smoke
- South
- Staple
- Strange Faeces
- Tabla Book of New Verse, The
- Thumbscrew
- Tolling Elves
- Ugly Tree, The
- Weyfarers
- Wolf, The
- Yellow Crane, The