When All the World Is Old

by John Rybicki

At the age of twenty-nine, just five years after they met, John Rybicki’s wife, the poet Julie Moulds, was diagnosed with cancer. Here, in poems raw and graceful, authentic and wise, Rybicki pays homage to the brave love they shared during her sixteen-year battle and praises the caregivers―nurses and doctors and friends―who helped them throughout. He invites the reader to bear witness to not only the chemotherapy, the many remissions, and the bone marrow transplants, but also the adoption of the couple’s son, the lifted prayers, borrowed time, and lovers’ last touches. A husband smashes an ice-cream cone against his forehead to make his wife laugh. He awakes in the middle of the night to find their dog drowsing atop a pile of her remnant clothes. The lamentations and celebrations of When All the World Is Old create a living testament to an endless love. Braided with intimate entries from Moulds’s journal, these poems become the unflinching and lyric autobiography of a man hurtling himself headlong into the fire and emerging, somehow, to offer us a portrait of light and grace. Rybicki’s hymns rest in the knowledge that even though all of our love stories one day come to an end, we must honor the loving anyway. The poet has dipped his pen in despair, but as he cleaves his heart and our own, he transmits the exquisite pain of loss into a beauty so fierce and scalding and ultimately healing that the reader comes out whole on the other side.

Genres: Poetry

106 pages, Paperback Original

First published April 1, 2012

Reviews

[s.penkevich [hiatus-will return-miss you all] · Rating 4 out of 5]

We will grow old
with the world, you and I,
and the earth will be our skeleton.

I want to love writes poet John Rybicki, until we are old.. At the age of 29, Julie Mold—poet and wife to Rybicki—was diagnosed with cancer and passed 16 years later after a long battle fraught with relapses and transplants. When All the World is Old by Rybicki chronicles a tale of limitless love and loss, and the devastated wilderness of the aftermath. These poems are pointblank and often embody the feeling of being the unlit side at the bottom of a dried up well. They stare right into your heart and you are made to react by uncovering the hidden recesses of self only tapped by extreme emotional pain, the sort of pain that sears into a realm of reality seemingly through and beyond our own waking life, call it whatever you will. Or, perhaps, it is that our pain has burned a whole in the pages of reality through which we have slipped and stare at the world from the outside, feeling like a plane crash victim rejoining consciousness stranded in a broiling, endless desert with a void instead of sky overhead.When All the World is Old is a glowing elegy to a lost love and also the necessary outpour of sadness leading towards a healthy recovery,

If
If I could tie a river around my love’s waist like ribbon,
make sails out of her blood
and pin down death like a squirming bug.

If I could lift and rock each coffin in my arms
I would start with hers.

This is a very powerful collection written in times of near-implosive sorrow. The prose is often times sharp steel that strikes right to the core, yet at times also descends upon the reader like a rush of ungraspable air in numbed landscapes of weightless beauty. The poet—whose earlier collection Traveling at High Speeds, dealing primarily with his hometown of Detroit, Michigan, is another worthwhile investigation—has a gift for probing your most tender regions without tumbling into feeling forced or twee or any other nauseous sentimentality. This isn't one of those books that constantly look up from the page to see if it has made you cry yet, capitalizing on emotion to pull an effect; this book is not dredging up emotion but simply is emotion pure and true. They are delicate and bruised, yet strong and empowered. They are a beautiful reflection on a lost life and an investigation into the poetry sweat out by pain. Most of the poems do address the situation directly, yet there are many that look outwards into life but bear the loss in their tone. Each poem somehow builds it’s monuments of prose on a dry landscape of love and loss.

(from The Noise From my Fingers)
Maybe time itself came brushing
the trail behind me until it vanished

clean off the grass, and I took up residence
with all the other balloons
floating along the landscape.

This is a collection for all who have ever loved and lost, yet the power is not lost on any reader not currently in such a state as he probes a universal emotional trigger. It is a difficult collection to read beyond a poem or two at a time, because it soaks you in such melancholy even when the poems stretch into optimism. Still, it is a wonderful collection and sure to break your heart.

4/5

I’m Only Sleeping
Another six-pack in the tub
floating downstream
next to my bed.

I fall asleep with the light on
and a beer in hand. It tips over
so I wake up in what

feels like my own piss.
My Jack Russell’s drowsing
two feet higher at the foot of the bed.

He’s there with all those clothes heaped up
and layered over Julie’s hospital things:
her bathrobe, diapers, and soft bottoms;

lotion for rubber her face and bald head.
Let go now, Johnny.
The moon is writing

sweeter sentences on the water
that you anyway.
Pull the earth over you now and sleep.

Those last few lines are devastating(ly good).

[Rachel · Rating 4 out of 5]

Really beautiful book. If you work with any people who are sick, dying, or grieving, read this. If you yourself are sick, dying, or grieving, read this. If you love someone, read this. If you like poetry, read this.

[Amanda Carver · Rating 4 out of 5]

It was maybe not quite as thrilling as We Bed Down into Water, but it was every bit as touching.

[Liz · Rating 5 out of 5]

Heartbreaking. Publicly so, if read on a plane.

[M. Sarki · Rating 5 out of 5]

https://rogueliterarysociety.com/f/wh...

After revisiting Rybicki’s first book of poetry, Traveling at High Speeds, and coming away staggered by my initial ignorance regarding its quality and importance, I decided to hop ahead to his third book and get inside the meat of his love, the loss, and his punishing survival. My understanding of death, and being aware of his partner’s long struggle with cancer and eventual demise, I wanted to feel his grief more deeply than relying on what I know as my own. And John Rybicki delivered.

I can’t tell you the number of times he brought tears to my eyes, made me weep and feel this loss. It is awful to lose somebody we love. And these beautiful poems only make it worse for some of us, the painful reminders, the bringing back to life all the agony and struggles just to survive another day. Sometimes it all feels too much to bear, overwhelming in its massive onslaught, crippling in its accompanying despair. There is no need to quote any poems here or to add a photo of one of his pages. This is a book to share and to return to often. There is no escaping what is in store for us. Alone and dying. Or left to sit next to a vacant chair.

[Lianna Kendig]

It didn’t feel right rating poetry, as I don’t really know much about it from a technical standpoint. I did enjoy some of the poems in here.