In the introduction to his poetry collection, “Poems in a Time of Grief,” Greenfield author Gary Greene is upfront about its purpose: “This isn’t a book written for poetry lovers. This is a book of poetry written for those grieving a personal loss, by someone who was and is grieving.”
As Greene explains, he lost his wife, Jean, a few years ago to what he calls a “devastating autoimmune neurological disease that remained undiagnosed and virtually untreatable.” Facing his first significant holiday without her — Memorial Day 2019 — he found himself writing the first poem in his collection, “World of Wrong,” as a means of trying to cope with his intense grief. And with that, the others began to follow, he says: “(T)he figurative emotional dam had been breached.”
In a mix of free-verse and prose poems, Greene tackles a wide range of emotions as he recalls the months he spent by his wife’s side before she died, memories of their time together, and then the devastation of losing her. There’s plenty of anger, for one, as in “Satisfaction,” in which he writes “I want revenge. / I want to fight for you, / physically battle, / destroy your attacker with my fists, / feet, teeth, screams, / bone, muscle, sinew …”
In “Guilty as Charged,” he recalls being forced to approve the medical decisions to alleviate his wife’s suffering, even knowing that would lead to her death: “It fell to me, then / your protector and fiercest guardian, / the one sworn never to harm you, / to become your executioner.”
Then there’s the loss of joy and the sense that life has become a ritual without much meaning or purpose with his partner gone. “Colors of late” speaks to a monotone world: “Mind the color of fog, / thoughts a darker gray // sullen sun, muted in pewter sky, / clouds a shade a clay // nights as black as a miner’s lungs, / the moon begun to rust …”
As dark as these poems may be, Greene notes in an afterword, writing them has helped him channel some of his feelings, in turn giving him another way of dealing with grief; he’s also drawn help from friends and a therapist, he writes. And his hope is that others coping with the loss of a loved one may get some benefit from his collection: “If you’ve read this far, I hope this has helped you. If it has, I thank you for that.”
Greene also notes that he’ll be donating 50% of the retail value of the book ($12.99), from all sales from local bookstores, to the Food Bank of Western Massachusetts in memory of his wife. More information about that and his poetry collection is available at poemsinatimeofgrief.com.
Steve Pfarrer can be reached at spfarrer@gazettenet.com.