Hereafter

by Alan Felsenthal

Alan Felsenthal’s tender second collection of poems, Hereafter, moves between the difficult work of mourning and the spirited nature of life. Both an elegy for a dear friend and a search for signs of renewal, these poems recover pastoral symbols of sorrow from cliché. Essential in their attempt at consolation, Felsenthal's requiems traverse landscapes—the ocean, the Earth, and the moon—using both humor and pathos to awaken the depths of feeling that follow loss.

"These profound yet accessible poems offer solace and insight to those navigating an unsettled existence." —Publishers Weekly

"One person in nature. There’s sadness and there’s always this detailed natural 'setting.' The words of these details, and the wondering in the reader about the connection. But they’re connected, one person, sad, and all this nature, because the poems are beautiful, rhyme in amazing places (nature does that too), and the sad person is flawless, he wrote the flawless poems. Nature is flawless. Poetry is flawless. Sadness? I love this book." —Alice Notley

Genres: Poetry

78 pages, Paperback

First published June 25, 2024

Reviews

[Skylar Miklus · Rating 4 out of 5]

Alan Felsenthal’s highly anticipated second collection is a quietly meditative work of nature poetry. Blending the pastoral and the elegiac, Felsenthal interrogates the impact of humanity on nature. His poems are infused with diverse sceneries: the ocean, the moon, and the desert. His voice is tender and hopeful for a better future.

[Tom · Rating 4 out of 5]

A meditative series of poems alternately concerning the death of a friend and nature as a symbol of hope and constancy. Composed in spare lines of 3 and 4 feet in the lyric mode, a page or two long, many written as a single stanza. Here is “The Hawk at Washington Square Park,” with its almost Eastern consolation for the “bitterness” of life while exemplifying its cure:

Set on a wire, on a breezeless
day, his frame was
a figurine that stared at us.
People, eyes on each other, pass.
The majestic sentinel sits
slightly above our bitterness,
his body its own crutch. He is
proving the true nature of his
greatness by being ignored. As
if saying, impassively, be noiseless,
unseen, not behind or under us—
you belong to your times—
but above, commit to spirit, yours.
And then a gentle wind comes.

Sparely punctuated, often using internal rhymes and slant rhymes to cohere the images, Hereafter provides gentle explorations of how to live, the metaphysics of a good existence.

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[E. Cunningham · Rating 5 out of 5]

What a beautiful collection. I love the stark tenderness of these poems, their fidelity to and awe of nature, the way phrases or images capture both despair and hope. Will be re-reading many times.

[Ian · Rating 5 out of 5]

I received a hand-written note from the author and as a person experiencing a year of unrelenting loss, It felt like a gentle hug with the warmth of a comforting friend..
There are books you read at cafes, while people go about chatting in the background.. This book is not one of those. It requires an atmosphere where you can contemplate, meditate. For me, it is to be read alone in the hours after the daylight has left. Dark and quiet. This book was the space where numbness and pain met. Fragmented. A gentle intensity. Like a flower vase that was shattered and put back together to be somehow more beautiful. For all poetry lovers and those experiencing loss, this will be a cathartic experience.

[S P · Rating 4 out of 5]

from Elegy
Electrolytes are hard to see
though they're everywhere.
Recover quickly
commands the blue bottle.
When will I be able to leave
this planet, you asked. Months
for some, hours for others, I read
in the hospice brochure. The Earth
alights on the edge of the ether. Calcium
in the crust, in the air, in water.
White lines along your shirt
trace where salt left.
The friction we feel between us
and light is darkness, the pain
unable to be untied or loosened.
Minerals obey their crystalline structures.
The soul seeks remission
and requires more. (3)
[...]
If you cannot see me, adjust
the lampshade. I may be lost
to blinking electric headlights
bypassing your home.
I recently learned the heart
can beat outside a chest with help
from a machine. The machine
works no harder than it needs to
and I acknowledge its restraint.
Care exhausts me until
I acknowledge everything. (6)

My Atmosphere
From the green axil of the velvetleaf
angled to the sun and its splintered light
a yellow flower that dulls the green
with its stigma centered in a pistil
opens to acknowledge a social bee.
The cosmopolitan beetle below
senses leaf-mining flies inside the stem.
Born into disturbed soil, this tall weed breathes
by heart-shaped leaves, a stout stalk of soft hairs,
its five petals that converge each summer.
Clouds rend the air, beams extend the sky’s dome
and converge in a far vanishing point,
bluish shafts telling us it is twilight,
our gloom. I’d show my son if I had one. (33)

from Happening Upon a Scavenger Hunt at the Museum
Any moment
peregrination from home enlarges, as I join
the parade of little strangers, following through
unlocked doors, all safety protocols posted,
my mind a vernal pool for newness to steward. (35)

from Is My Higher Soul Speaking?
If I cannot find the knowledge
the house burns down the school
burns all the books burn
Which is the knowledge angel
How to treat heart wounds
with a window plant
It was hard to learn
the word copse
after corpse (62)
[...]
Leaves speak
Trees write their most
potent verse
underground
their lines communicate water
Grafting goes with
love (66)
[...]
The mind's archive
run by interns
So many gaps in what I need
to know to know how
to say what
I want
There is birdsong only
birds can hear
filled with answers
I may need
What is the opposite of breathe
Open the windows
to make
your house a chime
wind plays (71)

[Kent · Rating 4 out of 5]

An elegy can have varying expressions. There is the elegy of sharp grief, where a poem swims itself toward loss, especially that singular sensation when the poet realizes the person they loved is “gone.” It’s a scene where the poetic grief is performed in its most affective state, knowing its authenticity depends on its spontaneity and rawness if it’s going to draw in the reader. But there is also the elegy of enduring grief. The person’s death is a dark, abiding presence. And the poem, or the book of poems, will need to be less performative and more ruminative. Conscious of timing, and mindfulness, and subtlety, and tone. It operates beside death, constantly aware of its influence on the poet’s life. But it doesn’t overdo this presence. This appears to be Felsenthal’s approach in Hereafter. Where individual poems touch on the nature of death, and how it occupies the poet. Informing him of grief, or embodying it, like an information structure continually darkening his perspective.

I realize it’s not new to observe elegy as a practice that speaks mainly to the living, even as it might address the person who’s passed. What is death for the poet? What if death is not so much a moment of truth but many moments that pass in and out of daily existence. Living after, what it might mean that this person keep existing in the mind and thinking about what life will be like after that person has departed. Felsenthal’s book opens on an elegy that particularizes the world, that itemizes attention while waiting for death to arrive. And then it shifts to beach scenes, with the ocean serving as an ongoing analogy for grief, for thinking about departure by sea, or arrival by sea. It’s a pastoral scene, according to the poet, which proves to be a subtle innovation on that form. I’m not sure a pastoral would normally include a momentous natural image imposing itself on the poet and his audience. And perhaps that’s what helps to seal the analogy of death-as-attendant-to-the-poet. His thoughts on death like spending time at a beach house, where this giant natural thing keeps noting its own presence.

[Emily Brown]

i thought this was very beautiful

[Irus · Rating 2 out of 5]

I'm sorry, I just did not enjoy reading these poems.