An Altar Without Limits: Some Elegies for the Departed

by Carol Flake Chapman

The poems in this collection, all of which were written after her husband’s death on a wild river in Guatemala, reflect the two traditions that helped Carol Flake Chapman most in her process of grieving and the New Orleans jazz funeral and the Dia de los Muertos, or Day of the Dead, celebrated in Mexico. In both traditions, the lives of the departed inspire not only grief but joy in their memory. Mourning, of course, doesn’t cease with a ritual, but in ritual and ceremony, she found, we can set markers along our pilgrimage.

Many of the poems have been written as elegies, particularly for her husband and for her mother. And for her beloved departed animals, including dogs and horses. But she has also included a number of unlikely subjects to commemorate, including trees and even a space exploration robot that expired on Mars. From her native American heritage, her notion of sentient beings is always expanding. There are no small losses, no small deaths, she writes as they are all part of the great mystery.

One year she was joined by friends in creating a special altar for the Day of the Dead in honor of the extinct animals that have departed the earth. And so she began to think of how all of us who are grieving might create an altar without limits that will encompass the very earth and celebrate those we have lost even as we mourn them.

88 pages, Paperback

Published June 11, 2024

About the author

Carol Flake Chapman started out as an academic, with a Ph.D in modern poetry and an esoteric dissertation on Wallace Stevens. She bailed out quickly in favor of journalism, and after a fling as a starving writer in New York became one of the founding editors of Vanity Fair. She has written for many notable newspapers and magazines, including the New Yorker, the New York Times, U.S. News & World Report, The New Republic, and the Boston Globe.
Her first book was Redemptorama: Culture, Politics and the New Evangelicalism, about the rise of the religious right, which is still used in college courses on religion in America.
Following the sudden death of her husband on a wild river in Guatemala, the course of her career changed dramatically. She wrote about her journey of grief and healing in her book Written in Water: A Memoir of Love, Death and Mystery. And as her path of healing progressed, she returned to poetry, her first love. Her dissertation, written in her early 20s, about the poet Wallace Stevens, is still cited in many literary and academic journals. She began writing poems not only about grief and loss, but also about her deep connection to nature, which had been integral in her healing. Her poems began to reflect her Native American roots as well. She received the Joy Harjo prize for poetry in 2019 and was cited as one of the leading poets that year. She has performed her poems in gatherings around the world, from Texas and California to Mexico, France and Mongolia. Her poems have been included in a number of anthologies and literary journals.