Bookmonger: Poems of grief, messages of endurance

Published 9:00 am Tuesday, August 13, 2024

Losing people is the theme of two new volumes of poetry published by Tillamook-based MoonPath Press.

In “Each Unkept Secret,” Portland poet and psychotherapist Donna Prinzmetal ponders the separate deaths and lingering absences of members of the family into which she was born.

Most families are complicated, and Prinzmetal’s is no different. In the poem titled “Nomenclature,” however, she makes the startling claim that “It’s what we want, isn’t it, to be known, / to be labeled for the damaged goods that we are?” Perhaps her vocation as a therapist informs that outlook. The poem concludes with a vision of misfits congregating in a country “where aloneness is commonplace as shadows.”

Reflecting on her sisters’ “flashy rebellion” — Prinzmetal writes of flashing blue and red lights, a puddle of blood, rat poison, and one sibling’s ongoing pursuit of self-destruction.

She muses about her dad, an attorney and an artist, who died when she was only 14.

But despite an overdose attempt, her mother lived nearly 30 years more.

The poet examines her relationship with her mom from several different aspects. Notes of regret, guilt, anger and admiration produce keening harmonics in minor-key poems.

In one poem, she asserts, “Mother, we are still in exile.”

But in another poem titled “What It Was Like to Lose My Mother,” she concedes that loss is “a foreign country I had visited / against my will.”

Prinzmetal, now an elder herself, muses on time’s passage in the final grouping of poems. Pieces like “Your Body, Still Your Body,” “The Goodbye Train” and “Things I Never Knew I Loved” are deeply affecting.

Olympia, Washington, poet Thomas A. Thomas also writes about losing somebody. But his situation involves the pain of watching his beloved wife succumb to dementia.

“My Heart Is Not Asleep” is the title of his debut collection of poems.

“My beloved disappears, day upon night, untethered in time / leaving language behind,” he agonizes in one poem.

There is no hope of subverting his wife’s diagnosis, but Thomas does infuse his poetry with acts of kindness, bits of joy, perseverance and love.

His poem called “In a Time” is located in the middle of this slender volume. It focuses like a laser beam on August, which Thomas calls “the month and time of litany.” Throughout the years, August has brought contained the most precious and the most devastating moments of Thomas’s life: he catalogs these in this unshirking poem.

In other pieces, Thomas writes of “(F)ears and plans and strategies and / mitigations … ” Of “grief like a shriek” and kissing his wife’s now “affectless lips.”

Balancing poignancy with pragmatism, Thomas shares the day-to-day grit of caregiving, and his need to escape in his kayak sometimes, plying local waters for respite while having others look after his mute, memory-shorn wife, “in the little boat / of her hospital bed.”

Many will relate to these devastating poems.

This week’s books

This week’s books

“Each Unkept Secret” by Donna Prinzmetal

Moonpath Press — 114 pp — $18.99

“My Heart Is Not Asleep” by Thomas A. Thomas

MoonPath Press — 66 pp — $16.99