Ghost Volcano Poems

Here in her beautiful and brilliant new collection, Sandra Gilbert collects the poems she wrote in memory of her husband’s unexpected and inexplicable death. Widow’s Walk,
the book’s centerpiece, charts the poet’s journey through the stages of grief, from the bleak moments when her lost love seems massive as a ghost volcano, dead/and gigantic and frozen in reproach,
so that there is nowhere/you are not, nowhere/you are not not,
to the tenuous instant when she realizes that she must send you forth … musing and lit with your own past toward the unimaginable ice cliffs, / south of the south. At the same time, in longer and more formal worksespecially the two ambitious sequences Notes on Masada and Water Music - Gilbert seeks both to elegize her husband and to understand his death in public, political, and philosophical contexts. Ghost Volcano is a tender, courageous, loving, and ultimately universal account of how we endure grief.