I often like the poetry written by prose writers that I admire, Margaret Atwood and Terry Tempest Williams, for instance, but this collection by Sherman Alexie has totally blown me away. Alexie plays with words, stanzas, and ancient poetic forms in ways that make me wish I knew more about poetry. However, the real power in this work is not in exploring sonnets or villanelles, but in mining deeply personal stories and emotions.
The overriding themes of death and god and love are woven together with the more mundane, like being insecure about love handles and creating an iPod playlist. The poems dealing with the death of his father are raw and honest and talk about loss and grief in a real way, without using watered down platitudes or sentimentality. Every day we are asked to consume death as entertainment - television is a revolving line up cops, crime labs, and hospitals, bestselling novels are all about finding the killer, and do we really even need to talk about the way that death is covered by news agencies? Even though we are bombarded with images of "corpses" being analyzed and attractively earnest young doctors breaking the news to overwrought families that their loved one didn't pull through, the subject of death and dying and grief is generally to be avoided on a personal level.
In his poem, "Grief Calls Us to the Things of This World" Alexie tells of calling home and asking his mother if he can speak to "Poppa" only to remember that his father has been dead for nearly a year. His mother responds with: " 'I made him a cup of instant coffee / This morning and left it on the table - / Like I have, for what, twenty-seven years - / And I didn't realize my mistake / Until this afternoon.' My mother laughs / At the angels that wait for us to pause / During the most ordinary of days / And sing our praise to forgetfulness / Before they slap our souls with their cold wings.
