About this item
Highlights
- Elsewhere: An Elegy meditates on the complexities of loss, on how private and everlasting the weight of grief is, how impossible it can feel to find stillness when memory and music continue to pull one back into heartache.
- Author(s): Faisal Mohyuddin
- 68 Pages
- Poetry, Subjects & Themes
Description
About the Book
"Elsewhere: An Elegy meditates on the complexities of loss, on how private and everlasting the weight of grief can be. Moving between short fragmented, answers, to the same lingering question, deconstructed haibun, and dream sequences, the speaker in Elsewhere: An Elegy cannot but help see himself as his own father, and his infant son as his own young self. He admits, I have still not divined / how to unhusk this steadfast / grief from my poems. Ultimately, he comes to recognize that the most healing way to grieve is to give, is to translate loss into generosity, pain into poetry"--Publisher's website.Book Synopsis
Elsewhere: An Elegy meditates on the complexities of loss, on how private and everlasting the weight of grief is, how impossible it can feel to find stillness when memory and music continue to pull one back into heartache. Moving between short fragmented "answers" to the same lingering question, deconstructed haibun dedicated to ghosts and cowards, and dream sequences that ask what it means to lose one's father while one is first learning how to become a father, the speaker in Elsewhere: An Elegy cannot but help see himself as his own father, and his infant son as his own young self still held by innocence and wholeness. The speaker, with a slowly gathering sense of compassion admits, "I've still not divined / how to unhusk this steadfast / grief from my poems." Ultimately, he comes to recognize that the most healing way to grieve is to give, is to translate loss into generosity, pain into poetry.
Review Quotes
In his meditative, careful, and deeply-felt collection, Elsewhere: An Elegy, Faisal Mohyuddin gives us a poet's grief-one full of human sorrow, full of a "rising flood of worries," but also full of the beauty of enduring love. Even after death, the shadow of that love can make space for our own prayers, our poems, with our constant heartbeat making time as we wait and listen for the voice of a grief-healing God.
-Ashley M. Jones, Poet Laureate of Alabama
Faisal Mohyuddin's Elsewhere: An Elegy is a memory palace of rooms filled with riversongs and baited fishhooks, where longing transforms into birds. This is a moving collection which touches on faith, grief, and fatherhood. It is challenging to know how to talk to our children about "their impossible wish for deathless tomorrows," but reading Mohyuddin's poetry encourages us to embrace this world of secrets for a moment and just listen.
- Greg Santos, author of Ghost Face