First published 2015
Julia Blackburn confronts the stark reality of widowhood three months after losing her husband, sculptor Herman Makkink, in 2013. She shapes her grief into thirty three verses that map the territory between before and after his sudden departure. The poems move through the immediate shock of death's finality and the strange new geography of a world forever changed. Blackburn finds herself occupied with death itself, not as abstraction but as brutal fact that has split her existence into two distinct landscapes. Accompanying her verses are Andrew Smiley's photographs of starling murmurations wheeling across evening skies above Walberswick in Suffolk. The birds' collective flight patterns mirror the swirling, unpredictable nature of mourning. This is grief work made tangible through precise language and the witness of nature's own choreographed movements overhead.
Genres: grief, poetry, biography-memoir, 21st-century
Vibes: emotional-atmospheric, intimate, lyrical
Tropes: grief, loss
Setting: Suffolk, Walberswick
Period: 2013
80 pages · Paperback · Full Circle Editions
Content warnings: death