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Slant Books - Robert Cording

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70 pages

English

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A propos
Informations
Extrait

Description

In the Unwalled City takes its title from Epicurus, who wrote: “Against other things it is possible to obtain security, but when it comes to death, we human beings all live in an unwalled city.” This affecting book—which weaves prose memoir with poetry—explores that feeling of being open to attack—in this case the pain of grief after Robert Cording’s thirty-one-year-old son Daniel died.

To borrow a phrase from C.S. Lewis, here is “a grief observed,” encompassing not only the big questions but also the impact of grief on daily life. For a poet like Cording, one form that grief takes is that of speaking to his son. In “Afterlife,” Cording has a vision of his son replying: “let the emptiness remain empty . . . Stop writing down / everything you think I’m telling you. / This is your afterlife, not mine.”

At the heart of In the Unwalled City is a series of questions: How does loss change a person? How does one chart a new life that both acknowledges a son’s death and still finds a way back to delight? How does one now live fully in the unwalled city?

LAMENTATIONS (1)

Grief is the art

(can it ever be called that?)

of starting over. Every morning

the same morning.

Every evening the same.

The light tipping above

the horizon, dipping below.

A day. Another day

of second thoughts. Another night

of if only, what if, what else

could we have done?

II.

Days, weeks, months, years,

all unpunctuated,

an endless run-on sentence

devoid of verbs, actions, time

and without any of

those little logic words—

although, just as, similarly, but—

that connect one thought to another,

grief’s preference the childlike

and then, and then, and then,

as in my six-year-old son’s journal

in which every day, every event

that summer in New Hampshire

had exactly the same worth

and felt to him like one

endlessly repeating summer day

which he loved, but which now,

as I read through it,

as if involuntarily,

day-by-day-by-day coldly numb.

III.

If language is fossil poetry,

as Emerson believed,

each word shuddering to life

in the instant it spoke

reality to its speaker,

the word I bore into being

(if only because I’d never fully

experienced it) was heartsore,

from the Old English,

heortsarnes—meaning “grief,”

meaning exactly what

it sounds like it means,

a soreness which is

not a metaphor for some ache

that can be cured

or will go away in time,

but a soreness always present,

the what is now

and now will always be

that returns you, involuntarily

or by choice, to the what is not.

A word that is almost a sentence

in itself, waiting for each

of us to complete it:

he is heartsore, she is heartsore,

I am heartsore.

Heortsarnes—that deep bruise

of sound born into word.

Contents

In the Unwalled City (1)

Lamentations (1)

Walking

A Pair of Roseate Spoonbills

Afterlife

Not a Wish

At the Cemetery

Locket

In the Unwalled City (2)

Lamentations (2)

Icarus

Lost

Bobcat

Another State

Koi Pond: Failed Meditation

In the Unwalled City (3)

III

Lamentations (3)

Torment and Love

Swallowtail Kites

Melancholy’s Mirror

Aubade

Doves in Fog

Sketchbook: Naples, Florida

In the Unwalled City (4)

November Deer

Father’s Day

August

St. Francis and the Birdfeeders

Coffin Photos

An Answer Without a Question

Early Spring

Screensaver

Quasset and Sprucedale

The Words We Speak

In the Unwalled City (5)

Acknowledgments

Sujets

Personal Memoirs

Memoir

Loss

Poetry

Grief

Family

Death

Informations

Publié par	Slant Books
Date de parution	01 septembre 2022
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781639821167
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0650€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

Over a long and rich career, Robert Cording—indifferent to and transcendent of any vogue—has persisted in addressing what I can only and inadequately label matters of the spirit. He’d surely be the last earthly soul to celebrate the death of a beloved son, “who is both not here, and not not here,” as occasion for his most powerful work to date. And yet it is that. And it is spiritual. To read In the Unwalled City is to have our hearts broken, poem after poem, even as we celebrate the deeper-than-deep humanity of its testimony. I’m simply aware of no recent poetry that matches it for mournful eloquence.
—Sydney Lea, Author of Here , former Poet Laureate of Vermont
In a grieving father’s voice, both vulnerable and steeled, the poet writes, “My son is dead and done with me.” He talks to himself through hybrid prose and poetry and to himself while talking to his son and, almost as afterthought, to us. He avails himself (and his off-camera readers) of centuries of wisdom, but, mercifully, offers us no moral summas gleaned from his devastating experience. Cording’s bracing metaphors and sudden shifts of perspective distinguish In the Walled City from many memoirs of grief and loss. We come to poetry for just this: intimacy and awakening.
—Martha Serpas, Author of Double Effect
Throughout Robert Cording’s In the Unwalled City , one is immersed in the essence of duality—first, in a mingling of memoir and lyric—where language itself is an incantatory talisman against incredible loss yet unable to offer lasting solace. The title essay and collection of linked poems concerning the poet’s late son impart a gorgeous grief which simultaneously embraces remembrance while also seeking some means of forgetfulness at “an altar where all rationality had to be sacrificed.”
—Claude Wilkinson , Author of World Without End
Every loss is particular; each bereavement has its own indigenous flavor. In this book of prose memoir and poetry, Robert Cording offers us an especially open and personal chronicle of grieving, generous in its detail, unsparing in its honest accounting of his own helplessness and “not-knowing.” Grief is work in the dark, and it allows for no easy or even orthodox comfort. Because Cording accepts his new and stark vulnerability, the intimacy of the poems deepens as he labors to remain conversant with his son and not lose his “fatherhood.” By remaining present to what is no longer present, over time the grieving father uncovers gifts of mercy and gratitude. And if Cording captures, over and over, how the ordinary and daily can be harrowing in its impact, In the Unwalled City is essentially a gentle, probing book—an uneasy elegy, a tribute to abiding love.
—Margaret Gibson, Author of The Glass Globe, Poet Laureate of Connecticut
Robert Cording’s heartbreaking book, In the Unwalled City, explores a terrible loss—the death of his son Daniel from an accidental overdose of opioids—with uncommon tenderness and grace. “Lord, grant me this fatherhood of pain,” he writes, “do not let grief be finished with me, // if only because it gives birth to my dead son, / who is both not here, and not not here.” He gazes steadily into this void, discovering not only a language for his grief but the saving power of love, which shines forth on every page. This is a book for the ages.
—Christopher Merrill, Author of Self-Portrait with Dogwood

In the
Unwalled
City

Books by Robert Cording
Poetry
Life-list ( 1987 )
What Binds Us to This World ( 1991 )
Heavy Grace ( 1996 )
Against Consolation ( 2001 )
Common Life ( 2006 )
Walking With Ruskin ( 2010 )
A Word in My Mouth: Selected Spiritual Poems ( 2013 )
Only So Far ( 2015 )
Without My Asking ( 2019 )
Prose
Finding the World’s Fullness ( 2019 )
Edited
In My Life: Encounters with the Beatles ( 1998 )
(eds: Cording, Jankowski-Smith, Miller-Laino)
In the
Unwalled
City
Robert Cording

In the Unwalled City

Copyright © 2022 Robert Cording. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical publications or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Write: Permissions, Slant Books, P.O. Box 60295 , Seattle, WA 98160 .

Slant Books
P.O. Box 60295
Seattle, WA 98160

www.slantbooks.com

hardcover isbn: 978-1-63982-115-0
paperback isbn: 978-1-63982-114-3
ebook isbn: 978-1-63982-115-0
Cataloguing-in-Publication data:
Names: Cording, Robert.
Title: In the unwalled city / Robert Cording.
Description: Seattle, WA: Slant Books, 2022.
Identifiers: isbn 978-1-63982-115-0 ( hardcover ) |isbn 978-1-63982-114-3 ( paperback ) | isbn 978-1-63982-115-0 ( ebook )
Subjects: LCSH: American poetry -- 21 st century | Grief -- Poetry | Bereavement -- Poetry | Death -- Poetry
Classification: call number PS3553.O6455 I53 2022 ( paperback ) | PS3553.O6455 I53 2022 ( ebook )
For Daniel
If I did not believe in the comfort of the spirit;
if your presence, which I cannot locate anywhere
other than myself, did not still console,
I might have no reason for talking to you
as if you were alive,
for constantly going out to you in these words
as if you could receive them.

The sorrow for the dead is the only sorrow from which
we refuse to be divorced. Every other wound we seek
to heal, every other affliction to forget; but this wound
we consider it a duty to keep open; this affliction we
cherish and brood over in solitude.
—Washington Irving
. . . you must continue his life inside of yours insofar as it
has been unfinished; his life has now passed onto yours.
—Rilke, Letter to Sidonie Nádherná von Borutín

IN THE UNWALLED CITY (1)
Against other things it is possible to obtain security, but when it comes to death, we human beings all live in an unwalled city.
—Epicurus
IN THE EARLY HOURS of October 14 , 2017 , my wife’s cell phone rang. The call was from my son Daniel’s wife, Leisl, who could hardly speak, but managed “I need you and Bob to come home right now.” My wife—not in response to Leisl, but to what she already knew as death’s sudden assault, cried out, “No, no, no, no.” Then I was talking—to the EMT, Peter, whom I knew from ushering at church. The emergency squad, he told me, was administering CPR to my son, but it “didn’t look good.”
We were in the Adirondacks. Daniel and Leisl lived in Woodstock, Connecticut, where my wife and I also live. Halfway across the Massachusetts Turnpike, I realized what Peter meant: that my son was already dead when he arrived. Two hours later, no one had called back to say Daniel had been taken to a hospital. I asked my wife if she thought our son was dead. She said yes.

I begin here. I have written at least four other beginnings. But there is no beginning. I say to myself, Daniel died. Daniel is dead. But his death goes on living, goes on requiring some response.
With grief one day becomes another. Every tomorrow repeats today, every day repeats itself. Grief can also be a sudden assault—images of Daniel cuddling the cats that seemed to occupy our house for years; Daniel, maybe eight years old, climbing out his window and walking around the scaffolding we had erected to clapboard our house and knocking on our bedroom window; or later (I must grieve it seems every aspect of my son’s life, from child to adult), Daniel as a surly teenager who smoked too much pot and fought with me about everything; who sprawled in the back seat of the car, pushing his two brothers into one another; or most recently, Daniel, completely at home at the top of a forty foot ladder or pushing snow from a condo unit’s high roof by sliding down its steep incline and letting the snow build up before him to bring him to a stop; Daniel who could focus on the job at hand so well, all else simply vanished. I wander, round and round, my days punctuated only by these sudden stabs of memory.
Daniel was thirty-one when he died. Writing about one’s child is like writing about one’s parents—it cannot help but be bewildering and fraudulent. It is a task that inevitably smooths out all the unknown and unknowable jagged edges.
I knew my son well. I didn’t know him at all. Every parent can say the same. Since Daniel died, I have often wondered if his death would be more bearable if we really knew each other, if there wasn’t the always unfinished business of coming-to-know.
Thankfully, Daniel was my Shakespearean fool: when it seemed to him that I was simplifying his life or life in general, or entertaining some impossible yearning as I just did in the paragraph above, he would usually sing out, La, la . . . la, la— kindly but mockingly, his nonsense for my nonsense.
I’d like to say: “I am writing now to make my son live again.” That’s true, of course, in the sense that all writing is an act of resurrection, or simply a means in my case of preventing Daniel from vanishing as if he had never been. But I am also writing, in part, to get back my real life. Grief involves a double loss—first, my loved son; and then my own life, at least as I knew it.
I have difficulty remembering what my life was like before Daniel died. I don’t feel those constant memories of all that has been taken away. “Before” for me doesn’t involve some loss of what I was or had. But I do feel that sense of everything suddenly being entirely and surreally different.

After Daniel died, I placed a photograph of him on my desk. In it, we are sitting in beach chairs parallel to one another on the Woodstock town beach. We are both in sunglasses looking at the water. I am in my forties. Daniel is seven or eight. When I put this photograph on my desk, I could onl