Asking

by Alice Derry

" Asking is what our entire country is doing-asking how to bear up under the loss of so many, these absences of our dearly beloveds. These poems answer by more than memory-by joining the beloved to the present in a way that makes asking itself an answer. An exceptional mind is at work here, lyrically, and with suppositional insistence, making a framework in poetry to approach and reapproach the death and the love-its successes and daily quandaries, its deep companioning-this is what really makes this book sing." -Tess Gallagher, author of Is, Is Not
"What can you do with grief? How can you fill a loss so deep it takes your breath? These poems make of grief a companion, a teacher, a voice. The emptiness the beloved left behind here fills with necessary beauties and essential consolations. In poem after poem, the world testifies for the lost, offers scant remedies-just enough. And oh yes, I must leave a copy of this book for my own dear ones, after. It will provide them." -Kim Stafford, author of Singer Come from Afar

112 pages, Paperback

Published October 1, 2022

About the author

Tremolo is Alice Derry’s fourth full collection of poetry. It was released by Red Hen Press on September 1, 2012. Tess Gallagher writes of the book: “Tremolo is a tour de force of vibratory power that marks Alice Derry as having come into her own as one of our very best poets.” As manuscript, Tremolo was awarded a Washington State GAP grant from Artist Trust in 2011.
Strangers to Their Courage (Louisiana State University Press, 2001), was a finalist for the 2002 Washington Book Award. Li-Young Lee writes of Strangers: “This book . . .asks us to surrender our simplistic ideas about race and prejudice, memory and forgetfulness, and begin to uncover a new paradigm for ‘human.’” Stages of Twilight (Breitenbush, 1986), won the King County Publication Award, chosen by Raymond Carver. Clearwater appeared from Blue Begonia Press in 1997. Derry has three chapbooks: Getting Used to the Body (Sagittarius Press, 1989), Not As You Once Imagined (Trask House, 1993), and translations from the German poet Rainer Rilke (Pleasure Boat Studio, 2002). Derry’s M.F.A. is from Goddard College (now Warren Wilson). After twenty-nine years teaching English and German at Peninsula College in Port Angeles on Washington’s Olympic Peninsula, she retired in June, 2009. She was a major force in conceiving and directing the college’s Foothills Writers’ Series from 1980 to 2009. Derry was born in Portland, Oregon, and raised in Washington and Montana.

Reviews

[Mandy E · Rating 5 out of 5]

The poems in “Asking” walk through the loss of a beloved husband. Derry works to bring grief, a country beyond language, within range of what can be spoken. That such a project is ultimately doomed makes these poems all the more poignant. Sometimes, reading or rereading the poems, I had the sense that something material had been withheld or proven elusive, but this feeling often adds to the dimension of the poems, like a shade each poem leads. In other moments, there are lines raw enough to provoke a recognition in the reader (“on endless June evenings,/you and I talked in the fearless light./ Your answers implicit when I asked:/ Where should I go? What should I do?”) about what we need most from the person closest to us, that the loss of the beloved is, in reality, the loss of a world, a multitude of losses emerging, expected and unexpected, long after the initial grief.

Derry brings the voices of other poets into the work for a conversation, and her reconsideration of Hamlet through the lens of grief offers a way to engage with the play that feels closer and more humane without diminishing the play’s complexity.

The divisions of the final section of the book, “The Genesis of Life” series, aren’t yet clear to me, but I’m willing to spend time with them. I look forward to encountering more of Derry’s books.

[Jason Arias · Rating 5 out of 5]

A skillfully crafted meditation on love and life and presence.