Grief Sequence

by Prageeta Sharma

Offering a series of poems rooted in the profoundly narrative yet disorienting experience of losing a loved one, Prageeta Sharma, in Grief Sequence, summons all of her resources in order to attempt any semblance, poetic or otherwise, of clear sense in trauma. In doing so she shows that grief, frustrating to logic and yet as real as any experience we might know, is ripe for the sort of intellectual and emotional processing of which poetry is most capable.

Genres: Poetry, Grief, School, Grad School

96 pages, Hardcover

First published September 17, 2019

About the author

Poet Prageeta Sharma was born in Framingham, Massachusetts. Her parents emigrated from India in 1969, and Sharma was raised a Hindu. She has acknowledged the influence of her parents’ religion on her poetry: “I was taught to honor knowledge and books like a religion and so for me poetry keeps this relationship close, true, active,” she told the journal Willow Springs.

Sharma attended Simon’s Rock College of Bard as an undergraduate and earned her MFA from Brown University and an MA in media studies from The New School.

Her collections of poetry include Bliss to Fill (2000), The Opening Question (2004), which won the Fence Modern Poets Prize, Infamous Landscapes (2007), and Undergloom (2013). Sharma has spoken of her work in terms of thought rather than narrative. In Willow Springs, she noted, “It’s important to explore a variety of cognitive experiences in the poem rather than just telling a story.”

Sharma’s honors and awards include a Howard Foundation Grant. She has taught at the New School and Goddard College and is currently an associate professor in the MFA program in creative writing at the University of Montana-Missoula, which she has also served as director.

Reviews

[Ron · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Poetry and grief are the same: You are taught to care about it when it happens to you."

[Sarah Cavar · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wavering between 4 and 5 stars here, but I'll give it five here for polish and concept alone. Grief Sequence is a sharp, unrelenting stone ground against grief's huddling form. It is meticulous and highly self-aware, scholarly but not quite academic (this is a good thing). Sharma is an incredible writer and connecter of emotional, social, spiritual, and scholarly dots to map the shape of her loss.

What I disliked about the book was its detachment, especially in earlier pages. Sharma seemed to mirror the sudden, merciless snap of a sudden terminal diagnosis against the appearance of normal coupledom in the segments she opens with. I'm not sure whether or not it was an intentional choice (it likely was, given the clear intentionality of the text as a whole) but it felt misplaced given the careful excavation and examination of feelings we are exposed to as the text moves forward. Overall, though, this sequence (or sequence of sequences) of passages were insightful and brilliantly composed, and I'd recommend this book to fans of Barthes (from which Sharma draws inspiration and a few citations) and Maggie Nelson.

[Eileen Kennedy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Prageeta Sharma’s Grief Sequence is a powerful book about the loss of a loved one through illness. It resonated with me about the loss of my own partner through Alzheimer’s. The poems are lovely. This beautiful and well-crafted series of verses helped me with my own grief and inspired my own poetry about the loss of my partner. I recommend it highly.

[Skylar Miklus · Rating 4 out of 5]

A powerful meditation on illness, loss, and grief. Sharma is precise in her diction, often using specialized language from the medical field. Favorite poems were "Sequence 1," "My Poem for My Stepdaughter," and "A Human with Feelings."

[Layla Elqutami]

"poetry and grief are the same: you are taught to care about it when it happens to you"

[Bea · Rating 5 out of 5]

Dense with pain, growth, and wisdom. How we learn to exist with loss.

[Ally · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book wandered into my life when I truly needed it. I’ve never felt so seen in my grief

[Erik Brown · Rating 4 out of 5]

"I believe now that I am wholly an approximation of something; never quite it, never the whence--not an answer to defeat's culpable treetop nor its contrary antidote, a mown lawn trying its best to glint a kind of deprivation I grant it in my poem, and only here and in the reader's mind. Maybe it's true that poems exhume the pride in our identities, how the landscape of our minds hold more than just figures and their pastoral circumferences, but dear, they give us their place to make the world stunning, a place to breach the contract we hold too close to meaning and fabrication, and from which we are given some of the most imaginative identities on this earth."

[Matthew · Rating 4 out of 5]

“You are not you and I’m trying to understand/ how a human with feelings disappeared.” (4)

[Cheryl · Rating 3 out of 5]

I understand how the poem can land on its nothing, so the cloudless is somewhere in a spirit that's vanishing on mute.

I learn that there are two winters and two early springs happening at the same time and I have to turn one season to the other to get past their painful awakenings. It's just a snow patch. It's still melting.

Read with Archives of Joy, it seemed fitting for the times we are in, experiencing a seesaw and rollercoaster and queasy boat on a roiling ocean between despair and grief and joy and trying to live alive. Some beautiful poems of loss, grief, and nature.

Seclusion may kill your heart in the process of producing the
love-stained stench in your poems, the ones containing bound-
aries of shame with their sober problems-bits describing loss
mirroring its inward entanglements, glow-torches you have
never seen before. You light them with two selves and don't
wait for anything to flicker false. You can discern the lantern
of a falling man, who burned down his desire with tiny hu-
miliated gestures. The mountain peak so high, thus you believe
it gives you the one majestic evening you earned. Its embrace
is a gentle coercion into wide wilderness: an amenable tyranny
of its expansion-grief's artillery to fill all of the black clouds
that sallow blue sky, painting it with electric photographic
sweeps.

You have to find your strength in this.

GLACIER NATIONAL PARK (excerpt)

I proposed then a drive to Glacier,
a fine faultless finery-the firs, pines, and stillness.

We drove up-higher than I expected-
up the steepest corners and edges,
and I looked out at spring's sustenance,
an earthwork
of forest trees scored in majestic columns,
bedded and wooded,
coated with needles, fully medicinal,

a simile

of shedding,

of giving over the live forested body
to its eminence.

Of the mountain's height,
its splendor-drop…

a few of my photos of Glacier in memory of her poetry and her loss:







I COME TOGETHER WHERE YOU ARE (EXCERPT)
…even though you are an atheist, and
so am I in many ways, even though I do come so together where
you are, and will do this every day, if you'll let me-I come
gently with all my unconscious troubles packed.

And I listen to every seventies-lite song for the messages of
discovery that draw us away from the unconscious guilted grip
and faulty trap

and make me serenade into and out of the halts of beholding
you for you to recognize the sound and reasonable influence
of the widower-hero you are.

MARCH WIND

I think it's a secret sequence blistering in early spring, found by the patch of snow melting.
We walk by its shine because it's a moon of sorts and we hold
our smiles large together. At that moment, I have an insatiable
cheer but within an hour it falls into itself like a blanket. It's
because if I feel a small change in character, a betrayal by you,
even in teasing, I will summon him in to help me out of the
present. I become morbid with this because I sense him en-
tering the room-and I can't have you both here-and then I
anger at you, because I am ushering him in now, and it feels
like a secret I can't share with you; and yet he's so far from me.
I am now with you in a little, tiny house. I have a much smaller
life in some ways and with less shame than previously. Then I
sit with this force of thinking and it turns into an intimacy I
can fabricate into significant claims, full of kindness for you,
which I have found because if I learn to see it only as hidden
from view I manage to get there eventually.

I learn that there are two winters and two early springs hap-
pening at the same time and I have to turn one season to the
other to get past their painful awakenings. It's just a snow patch.
It's still melting.

[Paul Scott · Rating 3 out of 5]

MEMOIRS WRITTEN AROUND the loss of a husband has become a richly developed genre in the last decade or so--Joan Didion's Year of Magical Thinking, Joyce Carol Oates's A Widow's Story, Gjertrud Schnackenberg's Heavenly Questions. Since women tend to live longer than men, and since more women are publishing writers now than in eras past, the genre will probably keep growing.

Grief Sequence is largely linked prose poems about the death of Sharma's husband, the composer Dale Edwin Sherrard, of a cancer that came on abruptly and took him much sooner than his doctors had been expecting.

Given the subject matter, it seems churlish to complain, but the book did not make a very deep impression on me, I have to say. Grief is hard--perhaps impossible--to be original about, as one of humanity's oldest experiences. Even so, some writers--Didion, in my opinion--do find a way to make its peculiar estrangements vivid and clear. That never quite happens here.

[Andy · Rating 5 out of 5]

How do you write a review on the process of grief, the death of a loved one, a spouse. There is no review, the book is a gift, a true glimpse of what it's like to peer inside someone's soul and observe all the messy, dark, and poetry parts of life. Thank Prageeta Sharma for publishing your process of grief and allowing us to read it.

[Maria Purtee · Rating 4 out of 5]

I started tearing up at multiple points and it inspired me to write a poem, which is always a good sign. It was so raw and so honest and didn’t care to try and fit anything. this gave it such a fluid quality, and would slip into poetics and nonfiction and back to poetry. It was connected and personal and honest and just really moving. 4 stars!!! which means it’s a new favorite for me.

[Shilo · Rating 5 out of 5]

The cyclical nature of grief & the text will spin your head around.

[Dani Kass · Rating 3 out of 5]

i had a really hard time connecting with the writing, but it was still an absolutely beautiful set of poems on working through grief.

[Ebani]

No rating.

[Colin Post · Rating 5 out of 5]

A stunning work of beauty and loss.

[Ben Schulte · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5*

[Linda]

No review-personal grief poetry. However, didn’t resonate with me.

[Nour · Rating 5 out of 5]

To revisit: A Human With Feelings, My Poem About False Friends, My Sensorial Prose Poem