Skip to main content

Rusty Reviews: Instructions for the Proper Cremation of Your Grief, by Amber Decker


Instructions for the Proper Cremation of Your Grief

Amber Decker

  • $8.99
  • 62 pages

Folkways Press

2022


I've followed Amber Decker and her poetry for some time now with respect and admiration. Instructions for the Proper Cremation of Your Grief, is a smartly produced 4-by-6 perfect-bound chapbook from Folkways Press, which  reads as well as it looks.


Take as an example the poem "Coal Miner's Daughter," a dangerous title with all of its cultural associations. Decker uses them to full advantage, the details of mystery beginning to coalesce and eventually blossom from the initial lines excerpted below to the in the final two lines of the poem: "the crooked gravestones/of every small-town churchyard."


I am a lover of all the dark places

the headlights of my car can never touch.

My empty womb is jealous

of the warm orchards

where the black-eyed children

of Appalachia gather at night

to pick apples

with their skeletal fingers

by the light of the moon.


These lines, fecund with possibility, highlight a collection rich in detail and a lyrical expression for which many poets would extract their eyeteeth. Toward the end of the book, in "Elegy,"  the narrative opens with "grief knocking/at the doorways of my eyes," and whose "bones [are] busy trying to climb out of my skin." There's a texture of felt-life detail here that both impress and express, shock and awe,  in demotic lyrics that go forthrightly from a female persona and assail with words an imagined world, resolving it in twice earned–at least– emotion. This is a fine chapbook, in short.


Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Ed Dorn's # 22 From Twenty-four Love Poems

                                               from Jacket The strengthy message here in #22 of 24 Love Songs can be summed up in two lines: ['There is/no sense to beauty. . .' and '. . .How/ the world is shit/ and I mean all of it] What I also like about this brief poem is the interplay between the title of the book and the subject of the poems (love/anti-love (which is not hate)): it's all a mass of contradictions, like love. And I have to say that the shorter poems of the Love Songs and the last book he wrote before dying (Chemo Sábe) seem to me much better and more memorable than the Slinger/Gunslinger poems. These (generally) later poems probably attempt less stylistically, but are more sure-handed, hacked from a soap bar, maybe. Easy to use, but disa...

Weldon Kees

Along with my Jack Gilbert kick, I've been reading the poems of Weldon Kees as well as the secondary material (very little of which seems to be available in book form), which is too bad. There's a pretty good book called Weldon Kees and the Mid-Century Generation: Letters from 1935 to 1955 , which is structured in such a way that it seems more like a biography in letters. Normally, a writer's letters are collected and footnotes are rare except to sometimes identify confusing timelines. Robert Knoll includes more narrative about Kees than it does letters. I think otherwise it might not have made a full book, otherwise.Very interesting anyway. Kees seemed poised for mainstream uber-success at 41 years old when he simply disappeared.  His car, with the keys still in it, was found near the Golden Gate bridge, but with  no trace of whether he committed suicide or simply ran off to Mexico, as he talked of frequently in his last years.  James Reidel's book Vanished Act: t...

Charlie Brice

Immortality You make sure to eat Grape-Nuts every third or fourth morning, cover those non-nut nuts with blueberries because they have gobs of Omegas and no Theta’s, floss every other night to inhibit heart infections, use mouthwash several times-a-day to ward-off armies of oral bacteria, walk the dog every night for a mile, eat an orange daily, take your Lipitor horse pill, your Enalapril, Verapamil, Singulair, Multi- vitamin, Allegra, and carefully cut your Metoprolol in half and take it for your arrythmias, and you do all this instead of church, instead of fingering rosary beads and telling yourself that somewhere near our galaxy’s big black hole Jesus and Mary are floating around without oxygen masks or spacesuits, and it’s in this way that you avoid the anvil of disease, the miasma of malaise, the numinosity of pneumonia—in this way you make sure never to die, you make sure to live forever and ever. Amen. Charlie Brice won the 2020 Field Guide Poetry ...