Stopping for Death: Poems of Death and Loss

by Carol Ann Duffy (Editor), Trisha Rafferty (Illustrator)

"The subject could be morbid, but these poems from all over the world lift the spirit with their truthful feeling and words that sing." --Booklist

Genres: Poetry, Anthologies

144 pages, Hardcover

First published June 15, 1996

About the author

Dame Carol Ann Duffy, DBE, FRSL is a Scottish poet and playwright. She is Professor of Contemporary Poetry at Manchester Metropolitan University, and was appointed Britain's Poet Laureate in May 2009.

She is the first woman, the first Scot, and the first openly LGBT person to hold this position.

Her collections include Standing Female Nude (1985), winner of a Scottish Arts Council Award; Selling Manhattan (1987), which won a Somerset Maugham Award; Mean Time (1993), which won the Whitbread Poetry Award; and Rapture (2005), winner of the T. S. Eliot Prize.

Her poems address issues such as oppression, gender, and violence, in an accessible language that has made them popular in schools.

Reviews

[Casey Kiser · Rating 3 out of 5]

The selection didn't resonate with me too much. However, I did slightly enjoy the book overall and the illustrations are a nice touch. My faves are 'The Stincher', 'Change', 'Memorial', The Death King', 'The Truth the Dead Know', along with Emily's classic poems that inspired the collection. Anne Sexton's poems were the highlight and didn't fit easily into this more light-hearted collection. I would recommend this book to certain people. I just didn't connect with it personally.

[Anatha · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.25 stars.

Now, let me explain.

This small anthology of poems about death, dying, and then the aftermath for the living was an alright collection. Each poem is respectable in its own right. Some are already well established in the basic canon of literature (you know, poems like Shelley's "Ozymandias," Owen's "Anthem for Doomed Youth," some Shakespeare, a song by C. Rossetti, Thomas's "Do Not Go Gentle in that Good Night" and Dickinson). However, the majority of the poems were more obscure ones from poets I was already familiar with (Lucille Clifton, Billy Collins, Anne Sexton, Thomas Hardy, etc.) and then a wealth of others I'd never heard before.

I don't know about you, but all that should be the standard makeup of a baller collection of poetry, and yet it wasn't.

Now, I've never believed in skipping around in poetry or short story collections. "Cover-to-cover or go home" is my usual guideline. And like the creature of habit that I am, I followed just that! The problem My personal problem with it was that each poem was alphabetized by order of author's last name (or lack thereof, in the case of several Anonymouses) of the writer. I fear that having such a short collection of poetry covering themes as grandiose as death, dying, and grief and all of its various sub-themes (suicide, war, burial, heaven, hell, death of humans vs. the death of animals, its dissonant naturalness and unnaturalness, etc.) cannot and should not be so arbitrarily ordered. As a reader, I experience the poems of parents dying or dead very differently from those of thanatopses or mere observerships of death, and it's jarring to hop from one sub-theme to another. It's too disconnected.

For instance, James Syke, who died of AIDS, wrote a meta-poem about the impossibility of writing a poem about AIDs when you are actually dying of AIDS. It was long and modern and super confessional and Sykes' terror of and frustration with death. And then the next poem was "Do Not Go Gently Into that Good Night." Jarred. Jarred jarred jarred. I wanted to play in this sandbox of death, but it kind of felt a lot more like a channel-flipping war in Seinfeld.

I tried countering this issue by reading only one or two poems a day, or reading a poem and revisiting one it reminded me of earlier in the collection, and it still didn't help.

In sum, I guess: the poems in and of themselves were not the problem. I definitely liked some less than others, but I appreciated the exposure and that in combination with the ones I knew, liked, and/or loved was just fine. Easy 4 stars. But then, a star was yoinked because I couldn't stand the way the collection was put together (hell, Duffy made it a point for her own death poem to be the very last one, flouting the order of all other poems---- what the flying, Duffy?? what's with that self-provided special privilege there?), and it totally undermined the poems' power and my reading experience. But then, you know, I really liked Trisha Rafferty's accompanying drawings, at least one for almost every poem. They're simple and imaginative, even beautiful in their sparing childlike lines and squiggles, which adequately reflect either their poem's content or the speaker's voice. Hell, it even sucked away some of the poems' grimness and supplied instead some... eh, je ne sais quoi, that gave the collection some semblance of consistency. So I allowed myself to add a .25 for the art (not a .5, though--I was more frustrated with the collection than I was smitten with Rafferty's work).


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Looking back, this review is really just a self-study on what I like about anthologies and what decisions I would and wouldn't make if I were in charge of my own anthology. I am a child.

[Zoë Danielle · Rating 2 out of 5]

Because I could not stop for Death,
He kindly stopped for me;
The carriage held but just ourselves
And Immortality.

Stopping for Death is a collection of poems of death and loss selected by Carol Ann Duffy with illustrations by Trisha Rafferty. The title of the poetry collection comes from an Emily Dickinson poem, and it is clear that Duffy channeled Dickinson when she selected the poetry for this collection and unfortunately I don't mean that in a positive sense. With very few exceptions Stopping for Death is a collection of poetry where the poems attempt to achieve self-awareness but often lapse into self-pity instead. Overall the book is also very dreary, and in the cases where the poems are they instead verge on both strange and remote. I think I would have enjoyed a collection revolving around death if it was either emotional or eerie, but instead the poems are mostly boring or just odd. Unfortunately my favourite one is likely the Dickinson poem it is named for.

The reason Stopping for Death is not a total waste time is one hundred percent due to the beautiful pen and ink illustrations by Trisha Rafferty which both perfectly accompany almost every poem, as well as standing quite well on their own. Her style of drawing is both interesting and perspective, and she is not limited by what is real or true, but rather uses her imagination to bring each poem to life, even when the poems themselves are often lack lustre. For that reason alone, Stopping for Death is certainly worth a look through, but I recommend focusing on the artwork instead of the writing for maximum enjoyment. **

[Kate · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read this collection every year in honor of those that I have known who have passed from this world.

This little anthology provides comfort and gives me the strength and courage to move forward, while remembering the fond memories of those who have passed before me.

Carol Ann Duffy, one of my favorite poets, selected these poems for this anthology and Trisha Rafferty's pen and ink illustrations are great to look at. A nice gem of a book.

[Edward Sullivan · Rating 4 out of 5]

An great selection of poems and always a popular subject with teens.