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In the Days that Followed
Following the news of a long-past lover’s death, In The Days That Followed grapples with the sudden knowledge of the existence of a stillborn child conceived out of wedlock and never named, and never spoken of after the relationship had ended.
How do you miss someone who you never even knew?
It is within this distillation of loss, of distance, and grief, that allows us to form the unborn, the unnamed, the absent parts of ourselves into the language, into the landscape, and give them a fleeting figure. By giving them a voice and a shadow, a gesture of acknowledgment, we can give a sweet farewell from the earth, from our past, and from their future they were never granted.
How do you miss someone who you never even knew?
It is within this distillation of loss, of distance, and grief, that allows us to form the unborn, the unnamed, the absent parts of ourselves into the language, into the landscape, and give them a fleeting figure. By giving them a voice and a shadow, a gesture of acknowledgment, we can give a sweet farewell from the earth, from our past, and from their future they were never granted.
- GenresPoetry
53 pages, Kindle Edition
Published May 7, 2024
About the author
Kevin Goodan
10 books1 followerKEVIN GOODAN was born in Montana and raised on the Flathead Indian Reservation where his stepfather and brothers are tribal members. He earned his BA from the University of Montana and worked as a firefighter for ten years with the U.S. Forest Service before receiving his MFA from University of Massachusetts-Amherst in 2004. Goodan’s first collection of poetry, In the Ghost-House Acquainted, won The L.L. Winship/PEN New England Award in 2005. Goodan’s poems have been published in various journals, including Ploughshares, Colorado Review, and The Mid-America Poetry Review. His second collection, Winter Tenor, was published in 2009. His latest collection, Anaphora, will be published in April 2018. He currently teaches at Lewis-Clark State College and resides in Moscow, Idaho.
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Displaying 1 of 1 review
July 8, 2024
These 41 poems, each limited to one stanza and one page, are named for their first lines, like hymns. With their old-fashioned lyricism and precise nature vocabulary, they are deeply rooted in place and animated by frequent rhetorical questions. Birds and fields, livestock and wildfires: Goodan marks where human interest and the natural world meet, or sometimes clash. He echoes Emily Dickinson (“After great patience, a small bird comes”) and also reminds me of Keith Taylor. The pages are rain-soaked and ghost-haunted, creating a slightly melancholy atmosphere. Unusual phrasing and alliteration stand out: “on the field / A fallow calm falls / Leaving the soil / To its feraling.” He’s a new name for me though this is his seventh collection; I’d happily read more. [After I read the book I looked at the blurb. I got … none of that from my reading, so be aware that it’s very subtle.]
Originally published on my blog, Bookish Beck.
Originally published on my blog, Bookish Beck.
Displaying 1 of 1 review