Love and Dread

Many readers will have first met the title poem of Rachel Hadas’ 23rd poetry collection, Love and Dread, in the November 18, 2019 issue of the New Yorker, a few months before the world found itself in the grips of a deadly pandemic, and as country after country went into varying degrees of lockdown, people sequestering themselves in quarantine, isolated and socially distant, families reduced to their nucleus. Poetry has a way of being prescient. Eerily, Love and Dread seems to speak already to that world of closeness and anxiety, with its beginning in hyper-focus ( A desiccated daffodil. / A pigeon cooing on the sill. ), and the ripples of rhyme dilating to existential birth/earth; bed/dread only a few lines later. Many poems in this volume unfold in bedrooms or at the doorway to bridal chambers, the bed the stage for birth, love, and death, and for the dream-world of napping and waking in between.

• A.E. Stallings