In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • Lasting: Poems on Aging
  • Robert Schnall
Lasting: Poems on Aging Edited by Meg FilesPima Press, 2005, 293 pp., $18 (paper)

In Lasting: Poems on Aging, editor Meg Files has brought together 158 contemporary poems that speak to the pain, grief and confusion with which we encounter mental and physical decline and death. The collection poses penetrating questions with no easy answers: How can we face death without believing in an afterlife? How can life have meaning when loss and death are so arbitrary? How should we live, knowing that we can die at any moment? And, finally, what are the moral implications of how we live? Many familiar names show up in the table of contents as well as some newer poets who deserve more critical attention. The key to the book's success and the main source of its potential importance is that it eloquently and movingly addresses issues we will all ultimately face. The majority of the speakers confront death without the consolation of an afterlife. In "Being Old, Still Playing" Gene Frumkin writes,"The old, all//of them, know that there are margins beyond which/there is no belief." Sometimes a speculation on our loss of memory with age leads directly into a meditation on the oblivion we will all face after death. In Anthony Hecht's "Sarabande on Attaining the Age of Seventy-Seven," the speaker laments that "The dramatis personae of our lives/Dwindle and wizen; familiar [End Page 167] boyhood shames,/The tribulations one somehow survives,/Rise smokily from propitiatory flames//Of our forgetfulness . . . ." Many of the poets distance themselves from suffering and death by treating them ironically. In "In the Sixth Year of My Father's Illness," Andrea Hollander Budy offers this mordant observation: "Some truths/we cannot learn. Some we forget,//as my father did, who yesterday/introduced himself to me."

Despite this darkness and doubt, many find solace and pleasure in the present moment. Dana Gioia in "The Lost Garden" suggests that when we purge ourselves of our yearning for the past and of our hopes for the future, memory, too, can be a consolation: "The trick is making memory a blessing,/To learn by loss the cool subtraction of desire,/Of wanting nothing more than what has been . . . ."

Sometimes as we grow older we feel more isolated and become increasingly desperate to believe. In Dorianne Laux's "After Twelve Days of Rain," a middle-aged woman tells us, "I've arrived/at a time in my life when I could believe/almost anything." At times life is seen as an uphill struggle; the only way to survive is to endure. In "Up But Not Over," Marge Piercy writes, "Always past these/mountains are higher peaks//and rougher terrain as the light/begins to dim and the load gets/heavier. Shuffle and sigh./The only way to go is on." In the end, death can be a blessing because it allows us to transcend worries and responsibilities. And Harvey Shapiro's moving short poem "Desk" reads: "After my death, my desk,/which is now so cluttered,/will be bare wood, simple and shining,/as I wanted it to be in my life,/as I wanted my life to be."

The poems in Lasting run the gamut of forms and styles, and together they attest to the vibrancy of contemporary poetry. Meg Files has assembled a collection which touches on universal themes an which should speak urgently to all of us.

...

pdf

Share