'Shaping Tombs in Words'

Catharine Savage Brosman describes her late husband, Patric Savage, like this: 

“I am bereft

 

“of curator, you see, of one who cared tremendously—

for books, for me—but would have sacrificed

the whole collection for my sake.”

 

The poem is “Pat Curating His Library” (Arm in Arm, 2022). In 2008, Brosman remarried Savage, her first husband, a lifelong dedicated reader who died at age eighty-eight in 2017. In his obituary, presumably written by his widow, listed among Savage’s pastimes is “reading (omnivorously).” Her poem uses her husband’s bibliophilia as the scaffold on which to build a love poem. Her bookish elegy is touching but what most impresses me is how much I seem to have had in common with Patric Savage, at least regarding books, though our tastes overlap only occasionally, judging by the authors she mentions:

 

“Mostly men’s authors. But lots

of poetry as well, hard-bound, great names

both British and American, some French, and poets

of our time—Heaney, of course, Sylvia Plath

(hardly in my view, whatever others think, a worthy

name to stand with those of Wordsworth, Byron,

Tennyson, Poe, Eliot, Yeats).”

 

I’m with Brosman on Plath and can’t stomach Poe. Savage favored history and books of exploration, always good reading. “He had two books out, always, sometimes / three, in different rooms and chairs.” Of course. Obviously. Who can read one book at a time, except perhaps while traveling or hospitalized?

 

“So I see him

standing there, before a bookshelf, reading

sideways down the spines, or taking out

a first book, then a second, checking or comparing,

 

“rectifying misalignment, laying aside a jacket

to be mended or discarded (though he held them

always in a high regard and preserved them carefully

for years—they also should be read, a paratexte).”

 

One is always fussing, shuffling among the shelves. I’m reminded of a friend with a sizeable collection of books, mostly jazz and humor, who promptly threw away dust jackets when he brought home new ones — an uncharacteristic lapse into insanity. The poem’s closing lines choked me up:

“Now,

I return the favor as I can, bestowing on him

fresh creations—full of his own Irish spirit, often.

I select a gorgeous book of his, leaf through,

and find the makings of new poems and the reason

I should make them, writing, shaping tombs in words.”