Death Styles, Joyelle McSweeney
Nightboat Books, 2024
Composed as a study of and around grief and time, South Bend, Indiana poet Joyelle McSweeney’s latest poetry title is Death Styles (Nightboat Books, 2024), a poem-cycle that furthers her confrontation of and articulation around the loss of her daughter, a process she began through her prior double collection, Toxicon and Arachne (2020). In the piece “On Death Styles: A Précis,” over at Annulet, writing on what was still a work-in-progress, she writes: “My work-in-progress Death Styles investigates the essential contradiction between trauma, which compels us to repeat the past, and survival, which compels us to move forward. These poems ask: what is bearable. How does the present tense bear the past, how does it birth the future—and how might we survive that birth.” A bit further on, also: “The title Death Styles makes homage to an unfinished trilogy by Austrian writer Ingeborg Bachmann, which struggles with the problem of survival in the aftermath of traumatic historical events (Bachmann herself did not survive).”
Echoing a form of the daily cycle, almost as concentric circles, her form seems closer to Bernadette Mayer, say, than Robert Creeley’s “day book,” as McSweeney allows the prompts and confusions, contusions and repetitions of daily movement inform where each new day, each new poem, might move. “To circle is also a style.” she writes, early on in the collection. The layerings of grief are punctuated by and through the repetitions, the incredible openness and indirect directness of her lyric, how she doesn’t shy away from grief, while simultaneously attending to the requirements of her day, including notes around her mother, her partner and her other children. “Darling,” she writes, as part of “8.25.20,” “I’m sorry you didn’t survive / reverse aubade / every time the sun rises / I want to crumple up / this whole heliocentric universe / still the helicopter rises from its crumpled cup / outside the hospital down the hill / and I race out toting your foster brother to wave at it / Good bye good bye / come back this time [.]” Or, further on:
You’re the grieving mother and you’re helping the detective. You run a finger down the column of inked figures. All the guilt is there. Tiny beetles are working away at the glue. After the baby dies you are all struck with lice. Your daughter asks you, Why do I have lice? You answer, Dunno, why anything, why did the baby die, as you comb away the lice. There’s always more of them. you run a fever down the seam of the book and split it with your fingernail and tear the page away. To hide your theft you expectorate.
You let it off your chest.
“Repetition, I have come to understand,” she writes, to open her afterword, “is the shape trauma makes of time.” As one might imagine, there’s an emotional rawness to her lyric, confronting the loss head-on, through a daily attention. The bulk of the collection exists as the title section, writing daily, dated poems from August 2020 through to May 2021, with a short coda within the sequence, “CONCLUSIVE DEATH STYLE :,” as well as a further coda-section, the poem-sequence “AGONY IN THE GARDEN.” “smashed up on a windscreen,” she writes, as part of “8.21.20,” a poem subtitled “A LIE DETECTOR FOR MATTHEW RHYS,” “bent like a stovepipe / thrown down a drainpipe / a banged-up memory-storage device / each time we hit a pothole, my chassis / convulses, the detective / so dry at the joint / he clanks [.]” In an absolutely stunning and striking collection, McSweeney examines the intersections and interweavings of grief and time, examining them together and separately, noting how they connect and impact upon each other, each moment tied directly to the next. “Will you / retract the dewclaw / rewrap each silhouette / for maximum / frivolity and shrewdness / and land / like a cat on the lawn,” she writes, as part of “9.1.20,” “sure as a lawn dart, a spear and a bee bee / which all have the same life purpose: to make a bee-line / to point to the eye / to punctuate / improve it [.]” As her forward continues:
After we lost our daughter, I wanted time to not just stop, but to repeat. Even if I couldn’t have a different ending, I wanted to have those thirteen days with her again. I was caught in a problem impossible to solve. How could I reconcile grief’s desire to look backwards with survival’s command to move forward in time, towards a future where I didn’t much want to go?
To endure this contradiction, and to study my own endurance, I wrote Death Styles. I set myself three rules. First, I had to write daily. Second, I had to accept any inspiration presented to me as an artifact of the present tense, however incidental, embarrassing or fleeting (these are identified as the subtitles for the poems). Third, I had to fully follow the flight of that inspiration for as far as it would take me. I had to tolerate the poem for the time it took to get it down.
rob mclennan is an Ottawa writer. On Beauty: stories (University of Alberta Press, 2024) is now available. You should pick up a copy.