The Art of Loosing

After the sudden death of his father, the poet Kevin Young looked for a collection of poems that might speak to his sense of loss. To his surprise, he couldn't find such a collection, so he went to work compiling one. The Art of Losing: Poems of Grief and Healing, Young's anthology, came out earlier this year.
Early in the collection, Young includes a poem, "Funeral Blues" by W.H. Auden, that was read at his father's service. It begins:
                    

                        

   Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,

                         Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,

                    Silence the pianos and with muffled drum

            Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come

Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead

                                                         

Young says the best poems are "precise about a feeling. A poem can be both blunt -- it can say it straight out -- it also can say, 'Stop all the clocks,' 'Do not go gentle into that good night.' It can plead in a way that we may wish, but we are not able to. And I think that that ability -- to be direct and say it full out, but also make music out of it, make metaphor, make meaning -- is really what a poem does best."
Courtesy of the author Kevin Young has written and edited many collections of poetry. His 2003 collection, Jelly Roll, was a finalist for the National Book Award.
As grief comes in many forms, so do the poems in The Art of Losing, which takes its title from the Elizabeth Bishop poem "One Art" ("The art of losing isn't hard to master ... "). Young includes poems on subjects from the unexpected -- like David Wojahn's "Written on the Due Date of a Son Never Born" -- to careful preparation, as in Hal Sirowitz's "Remember Me":

Every weekend your mother & I tour cemetery plots,

Father said, the way most people visit model homes.

We have different tastes. I like jutting hills

overlooking traffic, whereas she prefers a bed

of flowers. She desires a plot away from traffic noise.

I let her have her way in death to avoid a life of Hell.

Near the end of the collection, Young begins a section on redemption with "The Trees" by Philip Larkin, which points out not only that, while they seem to be reborn each year, trees eventually will die ("their yearly trick of looking new / Is written down in rings of grain"), but also that "their greenness is a kind of grief":  That burst of hope, Young says, is "one of the feelings that these poems capture.

Yet still the unresting castles thresh                                                                              

In fullgrown thickness every May.

Last year is dead, they seem to say,

Begin afresh, afresh, afresh