'Someone, I Think, Heard the Name I Named'

It’s not fair to think of our dead as “The Dead,” a demographic category that erases all distinctions but absence. My brother (d. 2024) and Jane Greer, the North Dakota poet who died this week, would have had little in common in life. Ken had no use for poetry and he framed paintings and photographs for a living. He was an artist manqué and I knew him all his life. Jane I knew only recently from her poems and the emails we exchanged. Each was a notable individual, distinct, not a statistic, worthy of memory. Memory salvages both from oblivion. In some of us, the elegiac impulse is powerful. By my count, the Summer issue of New Verse Review 2.3 contains at least ten poems memorializing or addressed to those who have died. Here is Victoria Moul’s “I.m. Andrew, October 2024”: 

“Cozen me then, my restive Lord:

The candles in the church blow out

After only an hour or more.

I have forgotten now which saint

Was in which niche and in what stand

I set my candle, when I paid

A few coins, not quite the allotted price,

Or even whom I named

Sidelong while wondering too

Whether the man who knelt

Across from me was married; how

We might afford that flat; or if

I should buy leeks or aubergine.

Attention is

So short and slight a thing, a flame

Snuffed as soon as lit, but all the same

Someone, I think, heard the name I named.”

 

Moul adds a footnote: “This poem is in memory of Andrew Hurley, who died in Paris on 11th October 2024. Andrew’s encyclopaedic knowledge of, and unrelenting enthusiasm for French poetry are much missed by all who knew him.” She speaks for me: “the name I named.” John Talbot contributes “Epitaph of Menophilos” to New Verse Review:

 

“Such days as were my lot I passed in joy

Buoyed in the quickening flux of poetry.

Bacchus was never very far away,

Or Aphrodite either. As to friends:

Not one of them can tell of an offense

I ever did them. I am Menophilos,

A son of Asia, till I left to settle

Far from home in the sundown hills of Italy.

Here I held my ground, and now am held

Among the dead. I never did grow old.”

 

Together, Moul and Talbot edited C. H. Sisson Reconsidered (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023). Here is Sisson’s “The Absence” (God Bless Karl Marx!, Carcanet, 1987):

 

“How can it be that you are gone from me,

Everyone in the world? Yet it is so,

The distance grows and yet I do not move.

Is it I streaming away and, if so, where?

And how do I travel from all equally

Yet not recede from where I stand pat

In the daily house or in the daily garden

Or where I travel on the motor-way?

Good-bye, good-bye all, I call out.

The answer that comes back is always fainter;

In the end those to whom one cannot speak

Cannot be heard, and that is my condition.

Soon there will be only wind and waves,

Trees talking among themselves, a chuchotement,

I there as dust, and if I do not reach

The outer shell of the world, still I may

Enter into the substance of a leaf.”

 

Chuchotement: French for “whisper.”