Walking Into Lightning

<p>After her husband died of ALS in 2014 poet Ellen LaFleche began writing of physical love and loss of the complications of memory of the small personal persistent sorrows that lived with her every day. These poems push back against clinical theories of bereavement by validating the necessary persistence of grief and remembering. They also challenge platitudes about the easy comfort of memories. <br /><br />The poem “Unbearable" for example describes the sensory joys of the couple's honeymoon: <br /><br />We splurged on fine wine and watched sunset spread<br />its slow flush across evening's throat...<br /><br />I tipped a shell against his lips and told him to drink.<br />Too sandy he said too salty but he swallowed the broth<br />wiping his beard with the knuckled swipes of a pre-historic man.<br /><br />Now memories of the salty taste of a littleneck clam bring an intense mixture of joy and sorrow.<br /><br />Memory also fails erases: "Your face is fading into my brain's neuronal mist” the poet writes and "I remember how you carried home a bouquet of foliage. /<br />I don't remember the spider that crawled up your sleeve."<br /><br />The sensual recurrent imagery of Walking into Lightning - fire ocean water corn fields thunder birth the pleasures of physical love - spiral through the poems linking them in a long tangled journey through bereavement and loss.<br /><br />This is a remarkable book for the bereaved unsentimental and undistracted profoundly moving and cathartic.</p>