Looking for Marie Howe

About a decade ago,  I read a book of poetry about this woman dealing with the loss of her brother.

Knew that the brother had cancer.

Knew that there was a poem about the brother getting a needle stuck in his eye to prevent losing his sight and I remembered a line in one of the poems that read -- He had washed his last dish.

But I didn't know enough to find the book and I thought that I'd never see it again.

↔Fast Forward ↔

I really wanted to read a book about grief but I didn't necessarily want to read an Elizabeth Kubler Ross book or Kerry Egan's On Living. After searching on the internet, I spotted Kevin Young's anthology, The Art of Losing; it has been a great book to slowly read my way through and I didn't have to wait too long (page 69) before I came across a familiar poem, How Some of It Happened, by Marie Howe, the poet that I'd been looking for.

I immediately ordered her book from the library and when I got it, I remembered the maroon cover and everything.

I can't say enough about the Art of Losing. Poems that really hit me in the solar plexus, included:

Sharon Olds' The Race

Ruth Stone's Loss

Elizabeth Alexander's Autumn Passage

Coleman Barks' Luke and the Duct Tape

James Weldon Johnson's  Listen Lord: A Prayer

William Matthews' My Father's Body

Edward Hirsch's Cold Calls

Ted Kooser's Mourners

Ruth L. Schwartz's Letter from God

Jane Kenyon's Otherwise

Mary Oliver's When Death Comes

This book also made me remember other poems about death that really moved me -- like Lucille Clifton's poems about her father and husband; Gloria Wade-Gayles' poem about her mother and Cornelius Eady's book about his father's death.

I am a bit late to the Mary Oliver a game but when I first read her poem Wild Geese, it blew my mind and, I think, more than anything else -- the first line moves me unbelievably and I, occasionally, use it to really center myself.