Death comes at us, unswerving, immense, pressing on us its only gift, infinite absence. Mostly we face away from it. Too often we are faintly reminded of it when we deal with losses of one kind or another.
Elizabeth Bishop came at this connection in her own querulously open-hearted way when she began her famous poem of loss with, “The art of losing isn’t hard to master.” And when a 26-year-old Tennyson, confronting the sudden death of his close friend and soon-to-be brother-in-law, wrote , “Break, break, break/On thy cold grey stones, O sea!” his words almost howl at the vast inhuman presence of careless death. But it is one (sometimes profound) thing to see and respond to the immanence of death in the world, and another thing entirely when a person you love, someone you might have raised from childhood or known intimately for decades, suddenly and too early dies.
This exposes each one who experiences it to almost unbearable pain and almost complete darkness in the soul. Warwick McFadyen, a journalist and poet, has published two short books, which he calls “tidal charts”, detailing his thoughts, feelings and memories in response to the sudden death of his son , Hamish, who died at the age of 21 in 2019. Review: The Ocean: a meditation, in prose and poetry on grief/The Centre of Zero: poems 2019-2024 – Warwick McFadyen (McFadyen Media) As with Nick Cave’s recent discussions with Sean O’Hagan in the book Faith, Hope and Carnage , there is no escaping the raw.