Keynote
A searching new collection by a poet who “pays exquisite attention to everything she encounters” (The Washington Post)
Book Title
Still Falling
Subtitle
Poems
Cover Image
Poem Excerpt
I thought of my mother, who’d once lain in bed
at the brink of dawn, very peaceful.
Very pleasantly, she said, for once
she felt no pain, she heard the birdsong
and knew death was right there if she chose.
It had been a preparation, she thought.
But later I understood: though they were gone,
I didn’t want to go to them, there was no other
place to go, Earth’s the right place for love.
—from “In Sicily”
at the brink of dawn, very peaceful.
Very pleasantly, she said, for once
she felt no pain, she heard the birdsong
and knew death was right there if she chose.
It had been a preparation, she thought.
But later I understood: though they were gone,
I didn’t want to go to them, there was no other
place to go, Earth’s the right place for love.
—from “In Sicily”
Body
Still Falling expands on Jennifer Grotz’s precise sense of craft and voice to investigate new territory in this astonishing collection. These poems are emotionally raw and introspective, exploring the profound capaciousness of grief. Grotz carefully and deftly carries the weight of losses and their aftermaths—the deaths of the poet’s mentors, friends, and mother; the endings of relationships; and the enclosures of a life spent in attendance to the world in a state of wanting rather than truly living. Here also are poems that movingly and crucially decide what dedicating one’s life to poetry might require.
But in the wake of painful loss, Grotz writes toward “this world, the living.” Her poems reveal and meditate on the paradoxical relationship between the literal and the figurative, at the heart of poetry itself, like the darkness and light of Caravaggio’s chiaroscuro. Still Falling is a book to be read slowly, calling readers back into the stillness of being, finding hope, “not death / where darkness and silence and dust are / only darkness and silence and dust.”
But in the wake of painful loss, Grotz writes toward “this world, the living.” Her poems reveal and meditate on the paradoxical relationship between the literal and the figurative, at the heart of poetry itself, like the darkness and light of Caravaggio’s chiaroscuro. Still Falling is a book to be read slowly, calling readers back into the stillness of being, finding hope, “not death / where darkness and silence and dust are / only darkness and silence and dust.”
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