Eve Joseph > Quotes

“For the sake of a single poem,” wrote Rilke, “you must see many cities, many people and things, you must understand animals, must feel how birds fly and know the gesture which small flowers make when they open in the morning. You must be able to think back to streets in unknown neighbourhoods, to unexpected encounters, and to partings you had long seen coming.”
― Eve Joseph, In The Slender Margin: The Intimate Strangeness of Dying

“Poetry’s fertility,” writes Jane Hirshfield, “lives in the marriage of the said and the unsaid, of languaged self and unlanguaged other, of the knowable world and the gravitational pull of what lies beyond knowing”
― Eve Joseph, In The Slender Margin: The Intimate Strangeness of Dying

“When we give up our dead to the water—as ash or corpse—we give them up to the peripatetic movements of the currents. They become travellers, sojourners, voyageurs beneath the dark, impenetrable sea.”
― Eve Joseph, In The Slender Margin: The Intimate Strangeness of Dying

“There is no road map for the dying or the bereaved. No linear path. There are stages that go back and forth. Moments of grace, moments of anguish. Grief is a mess.”
― Eve Joseph, In The Slender Margin: The Intimate Strangeness of Dying