Through a fog of love, memory and loss

A local poet makes peace with the dying of the light

One of the inevitable consequences of aging is that we may find ourselves faced with the physical or mental decline of one or both of our parents. Whether this loss happens gradually or suddenly, it is always heart-wrenching. Yet during these times, there can also be moments of grace and humor and the opportunity to reflect on your relationships with those you love. In Barbara Edelman’s first book of poetry, “Dream of the Gone-From City,” she draws on dreams, humor, the natural world, and memories to discover a resilience that enables her to memorialize her parents, while also letting go.

In the title poem, “Dream of the Gone-From City,” Ms. Edelman, who teaches literature and writing at the University of Pittsburgh, presents the surreal dreamscape of a woman who finds herself lost but wills herself to keep moving forward: “The problem in the dream is to get home at night/without a car, a wallet or a cent in your pocket ….” The poem is edgy and urbane, gathering speed as it progresses: “Now: the blurred fast cut, the double image. You’re on the street,/walking with your loud heart. Like every other time, you watch yourself/ turn into a dark shortcut.” Ms. Edelman uses the harder-sounding consonants — the ‘t” sounds at the ends of “cut”; “street”; “heart”; and “shortcut” — to evoke tension and the mounting panic in the speaker, who has “… no image of the home you’re walking toward.” This opening poem foreshadows the labyrinth of loss in the poems that follow.

In “Evening Song,” one of several portraits of a daughter trying to make sense of her mother’s incremental decline, Ms. Edelman paints the anguish of letting go:

In concise, unsentimental language, Barbara Edelman invites the reader’s empathy. At closer reading, the poem’s wordplay becomes a scrim that shields the speaker from the pain of witnessing her mother’s despair. As in several of the “mother” poems in this haunting collection, Ms. Edelman’s speaker navigates loss by making herself face it in all its gravitas and absurdity.

In “Maple Grove,” Ms. Edelman poignantly relates the final days of her father, a once-brilliant professor, whose mind and memory is now diminished. Set in a nursing home, the poem explores the daughter’s quiet outrage at the accrual of losses her father must bear:

Several poems in “Dream of he Gone-From City” also celebrate the healing power of the natural world. In “Adirondacks, May,” nature bursts forth, wild and vibrantly alive: “Let it be night when you plunge/on wheels through the ravenous/forest. Bats, ecstatic, twist/into illumined view and shoot upward ….” The lines pulse with breath and provide a rejuvenating counterpoint in a book of elegies.

If, as Mary Oliver once wrote, “Poetry is a life-cherishing force … ropes let down to the lost, something as necessary as bread to the hungry,” then Barbara Edelman’s “Dream of the Gone-From City” is such a gift, offering the reader a way to acknowledge the losses we all must face, while celebrating the tenacity and beauty of the human spirit.