Ghost Volcano

<p>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.</p>