Grief Said, “Have a Seat.”
- May 16
- 2 min read
Updated: 4 days ago
★☆☆☆☆
I picked up four books from the Library’s New Releases shelf for National Poetry Month, including, against my better judgment, Amanda G. Elsbury’s Grief Said, “Have a Seat.” Having just read Tracy K. Smith’s Fear Less: Poetry in Perilous Times, her argument that “a poem might leave one reader cold not because it has failed in its aims, but because that person is, for the time being, uninterested in the stakes of the poem’s chosen material,” comes to mind. I’m not immune to the processing of grief, nor would I question or challenge anyone’s means of doing so, and if the writing and assembling of this book “[t]o honor her father’s memory and offer more material on grief to the public” was helpful for Elsbury or for any of its readers, kudos to her for actualizing it. I can get behind wanting to honor her father’s memory, but does the public need more material on grief for the sake of nothing more than having more material on grief?
That doesn’t sound like a compelling argument for the existence of this collection. In fact, it sounds pretty tepid. Worse still, for me at least, is the religiousness that pervades the book, the kind that Christians of a certain sort exude as naturally as breathing, but comes off to me as nauseating proselytizing. And, worse than that, are the poems themselves. Structurally, they’re all centered and nearly all single-stanza, as if a poem’s form is irrelevant or unimportant to its success. Fundamentally, they lack emotional complexity, leaving the reader to tread water in the shallows of Elsbury’s grief rather than plumb the depths of the feelings that led her to write in the first place. What they lack is imagery, and “Without them,” Smith writes, “poet and reader are constrained to imagine or recollect from a distance, and from a place of thought or abstraction rather than one of visceral engagement.”
That is, the poems struck me as amateurish. To wit: “It might be possible / that some of the people / who cry the loudest / are experiencing the most regret / They left too much unsaid / Not enough got fixed before their person went / and they break in two with wailing.” Or, “I am sad and happy / calm and a little bit crazy / angry while also grateful / Here is my heart / Thank you for holding it, O Invisible Ones / and lovable humans in my circle.” Or, “You said that you loved me / And. You. Left. / What am I supposed to do with that?” I could grab a snippet of any of the three dozen-plus poems herein to make my case, and you’d either buy my argument or wonder if I was dropped on my head as a child. Maybe Smith was right, and I wasn’t interested in the stakes of the poem’s material. Or maybe Smith was right, and the lack of imagery made it impossible for Elsbury’s grief to strike a nerve, for her poems to create emotional resonance. I think both are true. It’s my fault for picking up the book. It’s Elsbury’s for not making me feel more once I did.
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