Joanna Klink, _Days and Chances_ (3)

 SEVERAL POEMS TOWARDS the end of the collection speak to the final illness and death of Klink's father. She had written about his illness before in The Nightfields, and very movingly, but these newer poems seem to me even more remarkable in their honesty and their willingness to think about death. 

Klink's love for her father is well to the fore, understandably, particularly in "Sand Woods," but these poems step beyond simple elegy into a kind of reckoning. She does not deal in any of the more familiar kinds of consolation or comfort, but there is in them a kind of peace or reconciliation that feels real.

I should quote something at this point, I guess. "Inner Vase" seems to be working with the idea of the body as a vessel--a classic trope if there ever was one--and the idea that, when all is said and done, what is inside the vessel is actually the same as what is outside the vessel. It ends with these lines:

          Who was I

then but the space that had

always been around me, never

not touched, the end, was it?

of my distinction, having

worked so hard to separate

myself, to distill, for decades, 

who I was, vessel, given

in in reverent surrender,

thinking always of the world

that let me stay this

long, the branch of 

air I become that is the room's

air, and the meadow's.

I'm not sure whether the poem is meant to be in her father's voice or is just imagining how the letting go of death might feel, but it sounds true to me.