Wesleyan Poetry
4 total works
Rachel Hadas's The Empty Bed takes an unflinching look at the loss of friends to AIDS and cancer, and commemorates the despair and rage of those left to grieve for the dead. Between 1991 and 1993, five of the poets with whom Hadas had worked at Gay Men's Health Crisis died, and in the midst of these deaths came that of the poet's mother. Written with the energy of desperation, the central section of The Empty Bed is devoted to a series of elegies -- private but also public laments almost secretly empowered by their formal schemes. The elegies are embraced by preparatory meditations on boundaries and thresholds; wise and passionate, these poems celebrate the consolations of friendship and of art. The collection is infused with a growing certainty that although the emptiness left by the deaths of loved ones can never be filled, it can be haloed and commemorated, and in that sense mitigated, by language.
The domestic facts of life are fashioned into searching meditations by Rachel Hadas in A Son From Sleep, a book about wakings. The poet is admonished by her dreams and summoned from her slumbers. Hadas's acute observation of ordinary things illuminates and expands them. She listens while a child plaits her fledgling macrame / of consonants and vowels. She learns several kinds of silence. She resolves to uncover language / as medium of nothing except mysteries, and for Hadas, mysteries take root in tangible things--in cats, blankets, subways, her husband, and especially, in motherhood.
Rachel Hadas brings an acute perception and a rich education to her exquisitely crafted poetry. As James Merrill wrote, Hadas's "honeyed words and bracing forms . . . over and over bring the mind to its senses." Rooted in the domestic and illuminated by Hadas's lifelong engagement with classics, the poems gathered here, many in traditional forms, draw out the relationships between life, love, time and art. This collection will be welcomed by all who love Hadas's strongly etched lines and passionate intelligence.