Ghost Volcano

Here in her beautiful and brilliant new collection, Sandra Gilbert collects the poems she wrote in memory of her husband's unexpected and inexplicable death. "Widow's Walk, " the book's centerpiece, charts the poet's journey through the stages of grief, from the bleak moments when her lost love seems massive as a ghost volcano, "dead/and gigantic and frozen in reproach, " so that there is "nowhere/you are not, nowhere/you are not not, " to the tenuous instant when she realizes that she must "send you forth ... musing and lit with your own past toward the unimaginable ice cliffs, / south of the south." At the same time, in longer and more formal worksespecially the two ambitious sequences "Notes on Masada" and "Water Music" - Gilbert seeks both to elegize her husband and to understand his death in public, political, and philosophical contexts. Ghost Volcano is a tender, courageous, loving, and ultimately universal account of how we endure grief.