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The Art of Dying (Volume 41)
Hate to tell you, but you're going to die. / Quite soon. Me, too. / Shuck off the wisdom while it's warm. / Death does no harm / To wisdom. Sarah Tolmie's second collection of poems is a traditional ars moriendi, a how-to book on the practices of dying. Confronting the fear of death head-on, and describing the rituals that mitigate it, the poems in The Art of Dying take a satirical look at the ways we explain, enshrine, and, above all, evade death in contemporary culture. Some poems are personal – a parent tries to explain to a child why a grandfather is in hospital, or stages a funeral for a child's imaginary friend – while others comment on how death figures in the news, on TV, and in social media. Some poems ask if there is any place left for poets in our rituals of memory and commemoration. A few examine the apocalyptic language of climate change. Others poke fun at the death-defying claims of posthumanism. A thoughtful and irreverent collection about serious concerns, The Art of Dying begins and ends with the fact of death, and strips away our euphemisms about it.
110 pages, Paperback
First published February 2, 2018
101 people want to read
About the author
Sarah Tolmie
13 books77 followersSarah Tolmie is the author of the 120-sonnet sequence Trio, published by McGill-Queen’s University Press (release date 1 April 2015) and the chapbook Sonnet in a Blue Dress and Other Poems (Baseline Press, 2014). She has also published a novel, The Stone Boatmen, and a short fiction collection, NoFood, with Aqueduct Press (both 2014).
She is a medievalist trained at the University of Toronto and Cambridge and is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Waterloo.
She is a medievalist trained at the University of Toronto and Cambridge and is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Waterloo.
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Displaying 1 - 22 of 22 reviews
May 22, 2019
Happy Hump Day, everyone! I'm reading poetry books, plural (hence the double review below), on this positively sun-struck breezy day.
Pick y'all's selves up off the floor at your leisure. Meanwhile let me explain.
The Art of Dying was one helluva wallop. Y'all might remember that I fell in love with its cover, enough that I used A Canadian Friend's gift to me to procure a copy after the AUP Design Show awards showed its stunning cover to me:
So I was reading the short, super-concentrated poems. "Self," I said to myself, "this is the Sh...tuff. This is why all those pretentious pit-sniffers whose only love is self-love (in all its meanings) write their vapid maunderings with silly line breaks."
I know, right?!
Memento mori...and does Sarah Tolmie ever put memory through its paces. I was, and am, compelled to think deeply about ten-line word paintings. That's not the commonest feeling for me. "You too will die" is my preferred translation from the Latin (pace Latinists with exact translations) of the phrase and that thought is ever with me. I think a lot of people shy away from the idea of Death when what they actually fear is the process of dying. We're divorced from its realities by the medicalization of illness. The process is part of Life, not of Death...and that's a Tolmie thought that I think makes the whole fear industry tremble.
It's the very first poem, in its entirety; it sets a tone for this collection that the remaining artistry very much delivers on.
You're not afraid of Death. I can almost promise you that you haven't thought about Death much at all. The pain and enfeeblement of illness are the things that inspire most people to flee screaming from the mere mention of Death. Its reality is possibly more terrifying: The Great Unknown, the place we're all going but no one has ever come back from to tell us about. (I am not religious and I don't believe y'all's bedtime story is in any way factual.)
A Facebook chat with an author of horror novels that I had very recently made me think again about why horror has no fear for me. The silliness of the rituals surrounding Death has always struck my funny bone. I save my sadness and longing for the living. They can make use of it, they can feel my empathy and my lovingkindness and my appreciation. The dead? I suspect they survive in some form. I doubt very much its a form we'd recognize. But the body horror and supernatural horror of the storytelling world, the world that this author and many like her inhabit, have little actual potency and their imaginative powers exert force on our imaginations in proportion to our fear of Death (which, I said above, I believe to be a fear of the process of dying).
The attentive will note my approbation of a rhyming-couplets poem.
Pick y'all's selves up off the floor at your leisure.
The New York Times photo
Then, after that delight to my literary sensibilities arose from the quantum foam, I read this article from The Millions and was reminded of Frank Stanford, whose 1978 collection Crib Death I found on my then-boyfriend the much older alcoholic abuser's shelf.
I read that as a teen and was shocked to my still-forming core that someone out there Got Me. The obsessive need for someone's presence. The intense internal fire that only comes to the surface when mundane reality offers a single, fleeting, unremarkable image of one's inner state and thus crystallizes reality in the same stunning, unexpected way that a chemistry demonstration creates shocking clouds of sharpness from water.
I don't mean to give y'all the impression that I can just *poof* summon up a poem from 40-year-old memories. I got the text from my memory of the book's and the poem's title and then checked out of the library What About This: Collected Poems of Frank Stanford. This kitten-squisher of a volume...750 pages!...collects a thorough and informed sampling of his magic mountain of work both published and unpublished. I got re-interested in Stanford after reading in the above-referenced article that Stanford had committed suicide at 29.
Twenty-nine.
Imagine the life unlived, the art unmade; the world's loss is incalculable when Death takes some unhappy or unwilling soul away from whatever Reality finally turns out to be. Assuming we ever find out, that is.
So the book...elephantine tome!...slogged home in my shoulder tote on a cold and rainy day. I sat right down to look for this deeply meaningful memory, but being a bookish sort, was unable not to read both the Introduction (by one Dean Young, previously unknown to me) and the Editor's Note by Copper Canyon Press publisher Michael Wiegers. I discovered this unlikely-to-be-memed aperçu in Young's Introduction:
What is more irrational than Death? Dying is rational, can be subjected to analysis and quantification, is possible to construct a schema to slot into one's syllogistic understanding of Life.
Death is the Great Unknown. Frank Stanford got that, and wrote with its reality up front and up close and personal:
An unpolished scream of a betrayed husband, a howl of the pain of being unwanted and still alive, a rage-filled hate-fuelled moment in time that Stanford lived and left uncollected in his paper alp. He's dead, he's dying in front of our horrified eyes always and forever.
Or is he the moon.
Or the chigger.
The reddener of millions of feet, ankles bending to bring them within frantic scratching distance of fingers long ago rotted away. The annoying, irritating, sometimes sickening (in all its senses) reminder that we're alive and Life is a Death sentence. Irrationally clawing at the reddened surface of our living corpses, we read poems by artists like Frank Stanford who just couldn't endure the long way home.
Pick y'all's selves up off the floor at your leisure. Meanwhile let me explain.
The Art of Dying was one helluva wallop. Y'all might remember that I fell in love with its cover, enough that I used A Canadian Friend's gift to me to procure a copy after the AUP Design Show awards showed its stunning cover to me:
So I was reading the short, super-concentrated poems. "Self," I said to myself, "this is the Sh...tuff. This is why all those pretentious pit-sniffers whose only love is self-love (in all its meanings) write their vapid maunderings with silly line breaks."
Most books of poems are far too short.first two stanzas of poem 22
It's hard to get your money's worth.
How does it make sense in the marketplace
To pay twelve quid for sixty pages?
Or fifteen euros, or twenty bucks?
So poets are shit out of luck.
I know, right?!
Memento mori...and does Sarah Tolmie ever put memory through its paces. I was, and am, compelled to think deeply about ten-line word paintings. That's not the commonest feeling for me. "You too will die" is my preferred translation from the Latin (pace Latinists with exact translations) of the phrase and that thought is ever with me. I think a lot of people shy away from the idea of Death when what they actually fear is the process of dying. We're divorced from its realities by the medicalization of illness. The process is part of Life, not of Death...and that's a Tolmie thought that I think makes the whole fear industry tremble.
Hate to tell you, but you're going to die.
Quite soon. Me, too.
Shuck off the wisdom while it's warm.
Death does no harm
To wisdom.
It's the very first poem, in its entirety; it sets a tone for this collection that the remaining artistry very much delivers on.
You're not afraid of Death. I can almost promise you that you haven't thought about Death much at all. The pain and enfeeblement of illness are the things that inspire most people to flee screaming from the mere mention of Death. Its reality is possibly more terrifying: The Great Unknown, the place we're all going but no one has ever come back from to tell us about. (I am not religious and I don't believe y'all's bedtime story is in any way factual.)
It continues to be fashionable to mourn the death of ritual.first stanza of poem 10
We miss the Neolithic ochre, smoking censers, silly hats
Cthulhu and Harryhausen prayers, all the mystic flap.
A Facebook chat with an author of horror novels that I had very recently made me think again about why horror has no fear for me. The silliness of the rituals surrounding Death has always struck my funny bone. I save my sadness and longing for the living. They can make use of it, they can feel my empathy and my lovingkindness and my appreciation. The dead? I suspect they survive in some form. I doubt very much its a form we'd recognize. But the body horror and supernatural horror of the storytelling world, the world that this author and many like her inhabit, have little actual potency and their imaginative powers exert force on our imaginations in proportion to our fear of Death (which, I said above, I believe to be a fear of the process of dying).
Death looks a lot like success.Poem 42 in its entirety
As in, "I killed that test"
"She slays me" and the rest—
Though it's the act and not the state
Whose power we appropriate,
All us murderous wannabes
In our casual hyperboles.
The attentive will note my approbation of a rhyming-couplets poem.
Pick y'all's selves up off the floor at your leisure.
The New York Times photo Then, after that delight to my literary sensibilities arose from the quantum foam, I read this article from The Millions and was reminded of Frank Stanford, whose 1978 collection Crib Death I found on my then-boyfriend the much older alcoholic abuser's shelf.
The Neighbor's Wife
Four a.m. and she's still gone
But I'm not going to call.
It's not so bad, until just before morning,
When I see a truck driver
Take a smoke out of his lips
And throw it out the window
And I watch it go to pieces
All over the road.
I read that as a teen and was shocked to my still-forming core that someone out there Got Me. The obsessive need for someone's presence. The intense internal fire that only comes to the surface when mundane reality offers a single, fleeting, unremarkable image of one's inner state and thus crystallizes reality in the same stunning, unexpected way that a chemistry demonstration creates shocking clouds of sharpness from water.
I don't mean to give y'all the impression that I can just *poof* summon up a poem from 40-year-old memories. I got the text from my memory of the book's and the poem's title and then checked out of the library What About This: Collected Poems of Frank Stanford. This kitten-squisher of a volume...750 pages!...collects a thorough and informed sampling of his magic mountain of work both published and unpublished. I got re-interested in Stanford after reading in the above-referenced article that Stanford had committed suicide at 29.
Twenty-nine.
Imagine the life unlived, the art unmade; the world's loss is incalculable when Death takes some unhappy or unwilling soul away from whatever Reality finally turns out to be. Assuming we ever find out, that is.
So the book...elephantine tome!...slogged home in my shoulder tote on a cold and rainy day. I sat right down to look for this deeply meaningful memory, but being a bookish sort, was unable not to read both the Introduction (by one Dean Young, previously unknown to me) and the Editor's Note by Copper Canyon Press publisher Michael Wiegers. I discovered this unlikely-to-be-memed aperçu in Young's Introduction:
Many of these poems seem as if they were written with a burnt stick. With blood, in river mud. There is something thankfully unexamined in their execution. I say "thankfully" because we have been through a long century of self-consciousness and irony, and while their brand of rigor and suspicion have brought intelligence to American poetry they have also brought rigor mortis, they have deadened the nerves and made poets fear the irrational.
What is more irrational than Death? Dying is rational, can be subjected to analysis and quantification, is possible to construct a schema to slot into one's syllogistic understanding of Life.
Death is the Great Unknown. Frank Stanford got that, and wrote with its reality up front and up close and personal:
Putting Up Fence
I believe the moon wades a creek
Like an albino with a blade
Fixed to a stick.
It rises, red as a place
Where a chigger's been.
Voyeur in the loft, leaving your gum
Stuck to a fork in the barn,
Like a porter paid to listen
With his head in a portal
Of a ship returning before it's due.
Then I come down the road with ice.
An unpolished scream of a betrayed husband, a howl of the pain of being unwanted and still alive, a rage-filled hate-fuelled moment in time that Stanford lived and left uncollected in his paper alp. He's dead, he's dying in front of our horrified eyes always and forever.
Or is he the moon.
Or the chigger.
The reddener of millions of feet, ankles bending to bring them within frantic scratching distance of fingers long ago rotted away. The annoying, irritating, sometimes sickening (in all its senses) reminder that we're alive and Life is a Death sentence. Irrationally clawing at the reddened surface of our living corpses, we read poems by artists like Frank Stanford who just couldn't endure the long way home.
November 29, 2021
(3.5/5)
With one of the most striking covers of a book I've held this year, The Art of Dying is an accessible, dark, and funny poetry collection exploring the theme of death. Not every poem hit, but this was an enjoyable read.
With one of the most striking covers of a book I've held this year, The Art of Dying is an accessible, dark, and funny poetry collection exploring the theme of death. Not every poem hit, but this was an enjoyable read.
June 4, 2019
By turns amusing, horrifying, touching and comforting, The Art of Dying offers unique approaches to a thorny and uncomfortable subject. The collection also gets my vote for one of the best book covers in recent memory (by designer David Drummond), imagery that is captivating on its own but also note-perfect for the book's contents.
April 8, 2023
This beautifully constructed collection had the perfect balance of structure, rhyme, and looseness. These are poems to read out loud to yourself, slowly, so you can catch the soundcraft as well as appreciate the imagery, symbolism, and meaning. Just perfect.
March 25, 2025
2.5 stars
This book had a really interesting concept, and I was interested in the to the dark, poetic writing. There were some well written moments, but overall, the story felt disjointed, and I struggled to stay engaged.
This book had a really interesting concept, and I was interested in the to the dark, poetic writing. There were some well written moments, but overall, the story felt disjointed, and I struggled to stay engaged.
October 9, 2020
This was dark and funny. A good reintroduction of poetry for me. It took a heavy topic and left me feeling hopeful instead of dejected.
June 20, 2019
Eighty-nine poems about death told with a light touch. Unafraid, defiant, mocking, and often funny.
April 14, 2019
Although the synopsis on the back cover proclaims that "The Art of Dying" is a "thoughtful and irreverent collection about serious concerns [...that] strips away our euphemisms about it," Tolmie's poetry is pretty damn funny and dark in a way that's right up my alley. Yes, "The Art of Dying" touches upon serious concerns, but Tolmie transforms them into morbid and playfully-rhyming things that roll off the tongue and beg to be read aloud in a way that I think the publisher almost discredits with that final quotes sentence above. Yes, there were a couple of poems that pushed the envelope a bit, maybe one or two that I thought were a bit much, and those can certainly be addressed separately. But overall, "The Art of Dying" left a positive impression on me despite the some of the critical and satirical angles Tolmie takes in discussing the various guises/definitions of death. It's not the kind of collection that's memorable in terms of how readily you can quote from it. Instead, it's the kind you'll remember as you're telling someone about it and go "let me pull it out and read you a couple poems from it, you need to actually hear them out loud they're that great."
January 25, 2020
I was so intrigued by the concept of this poetry collection, and the cover is pretty cool, so I definitely was hoping for the best when I went into this. I ended up... not exactly loving it?
Some of the poems or individual lines felt beautiful and profound. Some of the poems and individual lines were darkly funny. Unfortunately, most of the poems were really not to my taste. The political and pop culture references often felt very out of date despite the collection only being released maybe a year and a half ago. Some of the opinions about politics, activism, social media, etc felt like they belonged to a generation or two older than me. A lot of it just made me cringe. The form isn't bad, but I wouldn't say it's to my taste either.
Overall, I wouldn't go out of my way to recommend this, but I wouldn't necessarily recommend against it either since I'm sure a lot of it is differences in taste. I didn't hate it, but I didn't like it either.
Some of the poems or individual lines felt beautiful and profound. Some of the poems and individual lines were darkly funny. Unfortunately, most of the poems were really not to my taste. The political and pop culture references often felt very out of date despite the collection only being released maybe a year and a half ago. Some of the opinions about politics, activism, social media, etc felt like they belonged to a generation or two older than me. A lot of it just made me cringe. The form isn't bad, but I wouldn't say it's to my taste either.
Overall, I wouldn't go out of my way to recommend this, but I wouldn't necessarily recommend against it either since I'm sure a lot of it is differences in taste. I didn't hate it, but I didn't like it either.
December 4, 2023
look, it’s my fault for judging a book based on its cover. seriously, the cover is one of my favourites of all time. and maybe i just didn’t “get it”, but god, i did not enjoy any of this.
poetry that rhymes is tricky, in my opinion - it can have a seussian feel, which i just don’t get down with. not to mention my disdain for any mention of social media, memes, facebook etc in poems/novels (the author even acknowledges social media “infects” this book, but self-awareness is not an excuse for letting it permeate throughout).
anyways, i didn’t find it funny or clever or deep or.. anything, really. “jejune” is the only word that comes to mind.
poetry that rhymes is tricky, in my opinion - it can have a seussian feel, which i just don’t get down with. not to mention my disdain for any mention of social media, memes, facebook etc in poems/novels (the author even acknowledges social media “infects” this book, but self-awareness is not an excuse for letting it permeate throughout).
anyways, i didn’t find it funny or clever or deep or.. anything, really. “jejune” is the only word that comes to mind.
August 17, 2019
I liked the majority of the poems, but not all of them. I guess that can't be avoided with 89 poems. The ones that were "about" celebrities didn't really get me. Maybe it's because I'm not Canadian, I don't know. The poems I did like were funny, frightening 0r weirdly comforting. Also the cover is great.
May 21, 2020
Sarah Tolmie came to my high school and read some poems from this book. I remember we weren't sure what to think of at first but by the end we had all fallen in love with this dark yet humourous poetry.
December 22, 2023
such a solid and cohesive collection
it does date itself very much so with some current event poems, which i’m not a huge fan of.
if it weren’t for that and its niche canadian politic references this would have been 5 stars
it does date itself very much so with some current event poems, which i’m not a huge fan of.
if it weren’t for that and its niche canadian politic references this would have been 5 stars
August 14, 2019
Darkly humorous.
Not for everyone, however, for me.
Not for everyone, however, for me.
August 30, 2019
Heard the poet read at this year's Griffin Poetry Prize. Takes guts to take on this topic, this title, and unabashedly label yourself a poet and speak on behalf of humanity. But really, why not?
Read
November 1, 2019811.6 T652a 2018
July 23, 2020
First poetry book I read in years, about one of my favorite topics I study as a sociologist. Very interesting and recommend to read.
November 16, 2023
The book is very predictable.
June 10, 2024
I think it's ambitious and dangerous for a poet to write an entire book of poems about death. I think picking a topic like that could leave a writer open to sounding pretentious and trite, as death is not something easily written about without either saying what's already been said or coming off as a bit of a self-important know-it-all.
Unfortunately, this book did just that in my opinion. I will give it points for making me feel things, which is what poetry is supposed to do. However, what I felt was annoyed. Some of the structure and rhyme schemes of the poems themselves were genuinely very good, SO I can't bee too hard on the quality of the work in that respect. However, the views of the poet and the points being made just got to be repetitive after a while. Not a single gut-punch, heart-drop moment, which for me is how I knows that poetry is really good and special. Like I said, it inspired a reaction, but it wasn't a very pleasant one and not one I'd want to repeat.
Unfortunately, this book did just that in my opinion. I will give it points for making me feel things, which is what poetry is supposed to do. However, what I felt was annoyed. Some of the structure and rhyme schemes of the poems themselves were genuinely very good, SO I can't bee too hard on the quality of the work in that respect. However, the views of the poet and the points being made just got to be repetitive after a while. Not a single gut-punch, heart-drop moment, which for me is how I knows that poetry is really good and special. Like I said, it inspired a reaction, but it wasn't a very pleasant one and not one I'd want to repeat.
January 20, 2020
Not my cup of tea. Found the rhyme sometimes annoying and trivializing of a great subject. Found myself rushing through pages to get the book over with. An odd mixture of death themes within the same poem, at times. An occasional gem and definitely humorous. Felt like the author was afraid of her own satirical thinking so hoped no reader would get upset if she made it all rhyme. Poet has much to say, that might have proved interesting if handled in a different fashion.
February 24, 2018
The art (in/)of dying. Modern poetry that is immediately accessible. The theme expressed through a myriad of different poems. Rhyming was a little annoying, but that is a purely personal issue. Some of the poems felt abrupt but this didn't dissuade from the quality of the poems. I enjoyed this collection but it did feel a little scrambled at times, which is why I consider this one only okay.
May 23, 2018
The Art of Dying is filled with short, quite accessible poetry. It's not hard to parse the lines, or at least surface meanings of the lines. The poems are often witty and sardonic. However, I think Tolmie could have pressed her topic a bit harder for better insights.
Displaying 1 - 22 of 22 reviews