Introduction to
After Shocks: The Poetry of Recovery
for Life-Shattering Events
A Personal Message from Tom Lombardo, Editor of After Shocks: The Poetry of Recovery for Life-Shattering Events

On the afternoon of Saturday, April 13, 1985, my wife, Lana, was killed in an auto accident. I received a call at my office to come to the hospital immediately. She had been killed on impact. The policeman who had been at the scene was kind enough to come to the hospital to tell me, “She did not need the ambulance’s siren.” I bid goodbye to her lifeless body, with massive head injury, lying on a steel gurney. I found myself a widower in my early 30s, without peer among anyone I knew. Well-wishers offered condolences like this: “You’re young. You’ll get over this.” Or “You’re too young, you’ll never get over this.” I have spent the past two-plus decades coming to some understanding of my wife’s death, my grief, and what recovery means in the context of my own life.

I’ve focused deeply within myself, and I’ve traveled far outside myself to reach out to others. I can remember the precise moment when the shock of what had happened fell way, and my recovery began. It was an extraordinary physical reaction as well as a deeply emotional sensation. I went from the pit of grief to goose-pimply elation, then, an hour later, back down into Hell again. But I somehow knew deep in my soul that I had begun to look forward.

During the decade after Lana’s death, the wives of five of my friends died young: one from breast cancer and one from skin cancer, which are “normal” types of death, but the others: a scuba-diving accident, an asthma attack (while on honeymoon in Katmandu, Nepal), and a brain aneurysm. I spent time with those men, listening, sharing coffee, whisky, and what little consolation I could give, still trying to understand my own ongoing grieving in the context of their fresh devastation.

I have since started a new marriage and we have two lovely children. I still think about Lana and experience grief in some form every day, more intensely as the anniversary of her death approaches each year. I maintain contact with Lana’s mother and sister. Her father, whom I was very close to, died a few years after she died, and I’m sure her death summoned his.

I’m not an expert nor a therapist. Just a guy who lived it. I look at my life now, and some days, I wonder:Have I recovered? Or is losing a spouse like living with alcoholism? What does recovery mean? What recovery I’ve experienced—how has that happened?

Reading poetry gave me solace during the early stages of my grief. I returned to some old favorites—Emily Dickinson, T.S. Eliot, e.e. cummings, Robert Frost—not a particularly soothing group, you might say, but for me, they were familiar from a time in my life when my life seemed more settled. The language, the music, the ghosts in the haunted house offered an escape from a life seemingly shattered—an escape from “if…then”  “what if”  “how”  “why” questions plaguing my nights, questions that had no answers.

1985 was also the year of publication of Douglas Dunn’s Elegies (Faber & Faber), which won the Whitbread Book of the Year. A dear friend gave me a copy, brought back from England. Though the circumstances of Leslie Balfour Dunn’s death were quite different, I felt Dunn’s world embrace me.

Grief wrongs us so. I stand, and wait, and cry
For the absurd forgiveness, not knowing why.

A few years later, Donald Hall’s book Without, poems covering the illness and death of his wife, the poet Jane Kenyon, touched me in the same way.

These two books moved me deeply as books of recovery. They seemed direct, straightforward, and honest in their stories, emotion, and language.

It took several years for me to start writing about Lana’s death and the aftermath—my continuing life. My first poems dismantled whatever blocks I had constructed, and from that point, I visited my grief and wrote. I wish I could say that writing provided immediate relief or a sense of peace or closure, but mostly the poems were painfully draining and during the months that I wrote the first burst of them, I became depressed and irritable. I felt at times that I was picking at a scab covering an infection—the wound had not healed, the scar was raw and needed to open and bleed into the sun’s light. Over the long-term, writing the poems helped me find a healthier level of comprehension and acceptance.

Shock through acceptance—there is great disagreement among therapists as to the “stages of grief.” Are there five? Three? Seven? Do they come in some order? Maybe it’s a continuum, not discrete steps? But one thing seems clear to me. There is a process that begins with an event and proceeds to some form of acceptance, if not recovery. Sometimes it’s the death of a spouse. But the event might also be an act of war. It might be deciding to leave, or being forced to leave, your homeland. It might be the bottom of the pit called addiction. It might be divorce. It might be the victimization caused by abuse or bigotry. It might be a serious injury or illness requiring life-threatening medical treatment. Events of life-shattering proportions require us to achieve some level of recovery.

Many contemporary poets are writing about these topics. Mary Jo Bang’s Elegy relives her grief over the death of her son. Linda McCarriston wrote Eva-Mary, a heart-rending collection about growing up abused, which won the National Book Award. Sharon Olds wrote collections about childhood abuse and alcoholism. Others: Carolyn Forche, Bruce Weigl, Tess Gallagher, Marie Howe. Each poet has focused upon a topic of his or her own experience. Of the poets just mentioned, Bang is the one included here, but they all represent a chorus of voices in a growing sub-genre of recovery poetry.

What this anthology intends to do is show that the poetry of recovery cuts across many boundaries. What this anthology intends to accomplish is to provide its readers with a source of comfort in the language of poets who’ve experienced these events and have come to some kind of acceptance.

Some of the poets included in this anthology are well known award winners and Poets Laureate. Dunn and Hall are included here, writing about the deaths of their wives; Thomas Lux with a take on the daily routines of divorce; William Stafford on the death of his son Bret; Rita Dove on her foray into ballroom dancing as an act of recovery. But there is also the novelist Molly Gloss, in her first published poems, writing about the death of her husband, and Major Jackson meditating upon the passing of a friend and mentor, and Brian Turner’s stunning poems from the Iraq war show even in their horror the seeds of his recovery, while Pam Bernard and Stellasue Lee write about their fathers and how they dealt long-term with their experiences in the world wars. Liu Hongbin, exiled from China for his protests at Tiananmen Square, writes of his discoveries, external and internal, along his way to London, where he now writes and publishes in English. Susan Meyers tells the story of the year she banished yellow as her mother’s health declined. Ron Rash shows how people forced off their homeland by the Army Corps of Engineers can achieve a sense of closure with their past, which will soon be drowned by waters behind a dam. Laurel Blossom writes about the torment of the first 90-days of sobriety in a lengthy prose poem from her new book, Degrees of Latitude. The section of this anthology on bigotry brings together poems from African American poets Kevin Young and Randall Horton, the Indian poet Satyendra Srivastava, Nigerian poet Tolu Ogunlesi, Israeli poet Meir Wieseltier, and Hispanic American poet Richard Garcia. The loss of a child may be the most heart-rending horror possible in anyone’s life, but indeed, even from this, there may be lessons in recovery as told by Iranian poet Farideh Hassanzadeh and Israeli poet Rachel Tzvia Back.

As in all aspects of real life, recovery may take unexpected turns into areas that lift the spirits with humor or irony, and in this anthology, lighter moments pop into view here and there: Satyendra Srivastava’s twist on empire and exile in “Sir Winston Churchill Knew My Mother,” Joy Helsing’s shockingly funny take on her final defeat of a battering husband, the Roman Catholic poet Sister Lou Ella Hickman’s surprising view of the maternal consequences of her vow of chastity, Rebecca McClanahan’s wry imaginings of the “what-ifs” of infidelity, Carol Ann Duffy’s unveiling of the interrupted grief of Mrs. Lazarus, Simon Armitage’s litany for a Herculean collapse.

These few examples and all the poems in After Shocks: The Poetry of Recovery for Life-Shattering Events bear messages of recovery to its readers. The messages range from the raw beginnings to long-term acceptance. That couplet I quoted above from Dunn’s sonnet “Kaleidoscope” served as a model for my editing. I searched for poems in all categories that contained a message of recovery through the language of poetry: Grief, War, Exile, Abuse, Divorce, Addiction, Injury, Illness, Bigotry, Loss of Innocence. I have tried to select poems for their clarity of story, emotion, voice, music, and language. I hope first that readers enjoy the reading, then I hope that the poems offer comfort, guidance, companionship, and healing.

Tom Lombardo
Editor
After Shocks:  The Poetry of Recovery for Life-Shattering Events