The art of losing: poems of grief and healing

Reckoning. Musée des Beaux Arts / W.H. Auden ; Dying / Robert Pinsky ; The wake / Rita Dove ; "After great pain, a formal feeling comes

" ;

'My life closed twice before its close

" /

Emily Dickinson ; Secret knowledge ; Much hurrying / Brenda Hillman ; The race / Sharon Olds ; The whale / Terence Hayes ; Silence / D.H. Lawrence ; Futility / Wilfred Owen ; Lament / Anne Sexon ; Not waving but drowning / Stevie Smith ; Do not go gentle into that good night / Dylan Thomas ; Pyrrhic victory / Lucie Brock-Broido ; The mower / Philip Larkin ; No more / Mary Jo Bang ; Loss / Ruth Stone ; Sudden / Nick Flynn ; Do not pick up the telephone / Ted Hughes ; Funeral blues / W.H. Auden ; Graveyard blues / Natasha Trethewey ; Without / Donald Hall ; For a woman dead at thirty / Jean Valentine ; Final Notations / Adrienne Rich ; One continuous substance / Albert Goldbarth ; Iron / Jane Cooper ; Bereavement / Kevin Young ; This hour and what is dead / Li-Young Lee ; (Carrion comfort) / Gerard Manley Hopkins ; from Choir practice / Forrest Hamer ; To Bhain Campbell ; Epilogue / John Berryman ; Sea canes / Derek Walcott ; Autumn passage / Elizabeth Alexander ; Let evening come / Jane Kenyon

Regret. Nothing gold can stay / Robert Frost ; The spots / Joel Brouwer ; Like / Frank Bidart ; Dreaming of the dead / Anne Stevenson ; Grief / Stephen Dobyns ; Elegy for Jane / Theodore Roethke ; On the death of fiends in childhood / Donald Justice ; The shout / Simon Armitage ; We assume : on the death of our son, Reuben Masai Harper / Michael S. Harper ; Written on the due date of a son never born / David Wojahn ; Stillbirth / Laure-Anne Bosselaar ; Mid-term break / Seamus Heaney ; A litany / Gregory Orr ; How some of it happened / Marie Howe ; Freedom, New Hampshire / Galway Kinnell ; Ice / Mary Oliver ; The last hellos / Les Murray ; "oh antic God" / Lucille Clifton ; Speaking to my dead mother / Ruth Stone ; The reassurance / Thom Gunn ; My sister, who died young, takes up the task / Jon Pineda ; Elegy for my father / Mark Strand ; Men at my father's funeral / William Matthews ; On the death of a colleague / Stephen Dunn ; Marquee moon / Jeff Fallis ; The facts of grief / Jim Daniels ; David Lemieux / Denise Duhamel ; Dirge without music / Edna St. Vincent Millay

Remembrance. After / Elizabeth Alexander ; Poems for my brother Kenneth / Owen Dodson ; Artifact / Caludia Emerson ; Remember me / Hal Sirowitz ; Death is a woman / Joy Harjo ; Tiara / Mark Doty ; A memorial : son Bret / William Stafford ; The morning baking / Carolyn Forché ; Hand me down blues / Calvin Forbes ; Grief / C.K. Williams ; Myth / Natasha Trethewey ; The bones of my father / Etheridge Knight ; A song / Joseph Brodsky ; Those winter Sundays / Robert Hayden ; Asked for a happy memory of her father, she recalls Wrigley Field / Beth Ann Fennelly ; forgiving my father / Lucille Clifton ; White crane / Dean Young ; Elegy / Arnold J. Kemp ; cosmos, late blooming / D.A. Powell ; Abiku / Afaa Michael Weaver ; A refusal to mourn the death, by fire, of a child in London / Dylan Thomas ; Luke and the duct tape / Coleman Barks ; Birthday poem / Erin Murphy ; You don't miss your water / Cornelius Eady ; The dead / Billy Collins

Ritual. Water / Philip Larkin ; My religion / Anne Carson ; The truth the dead know / Anne Sexton ; Listen Lord : a prayer / James Weldon Johnson ; Dedication for a plot of ground / William Carlos Williams ; Facing it / Yusef Komunyakaa ; Funeral rites / Seamus Heaney ; Not forgotten / Toi Derricotte ; After your death / Natasha Trethewey ; Disposal / W.D. Snodgrass ; Seersucker suit / Deborah Digges ; Until she returns / Reginald Shepherd ; the oboe in Handel's largo from Xerxes as elegy / Quan Barry ; Transaction / A.R. Ammons ; My father's body / William Matthews ; My mother's body, my professor, my bower / Jean Valentine ; Dead letters / Mary Joe Salter ; "I needed to talk to my sister" / Grace Paley ; Fatal April / Thomas Sayers Ellis ; Celestial music / Louise Glück ; God / Michael Ryan ; Trying to pray / James Wright ; Ice storm / Robert Hayden ; Wasteful gesture only not / Tony Hoagland ; Blues procession / Terrance Hayes ; I just wanna testify / Cornelius Eady ; Incensation at the funeral / Matthew Rohrer ; My father's funeral / Karl Shapiro ; Cold calls / Edward Hirsch ; Burial (no woman no cry) / Kevin Young ; Mourners / Ted Kooser ; Lament / Louise Glück ; Request / Lawrence Raab ; Elegy / Meghan O'Rourke ; Translation / Franz Wright ; Storm valediction / Campbell McGrath ; One art / Elizabeth Bishop ; Prayer / Galway Kinell

Recovery. My heart / Frank O'Hara ; Poem / Simon Armitage ; The gilded shadow / Jane Mayhall ; On new terms / Deborah Garrison ; For the anniversary of my death / W.S. Merwin ; Hum / Ann Lauterbach ; Try to praise the mutilated word / Adam Zagajewski (translated by Clare Cavanagh) ; Grief / Matthew Dickman ; My father, in heaven, is reading out loud / Li-Young Lee ; Vigil / Phillis Levin ; Practice / Ellen Bryant Voigt ; Re : happiness, in pursuit thereof / C.D. Wright ; Light turnouts / John Ashbery ; Living alone (II) / Denise Levertov ; Beach roses / Mark Doty ; Death poem / Kim Addonizio ; Infirm / Gwendolyn Brooks ; It is what it is / Paul Muldoon ; 12/19/02 / David Lehman ; Weeds and peonies / Donald Hall ; The lilacs / Richard Wilbur ; Father / Ted Kooser ; After my death / David Young ; Lucky life / Gerald Stern ; Wild Geese / Mary Oliver ; The waking / Theodore Roetheke

Redemption. The trees / Philip Larkin ; In the city of light / Larry Levis ; And death shall have no dominion / Dylan Thomas ; What are years? / Marianne Moore ; First psalm / Anne Sexton ; Evening / Charles Simic ; The grasses / Rumi (translated by Coleman Barks) ; Redemption song / Kevin Young ; from The clay hill anthology / Hayden Carruth ; When death comes / Mary Oliver ; "i thank you God for most this amazing" / e.e. cummings ; Unsolicited survey / Phillis Levin ; And yet the books / Czeslaw Milosz (translated by Czeslaw Milosz and Robert Hass) ; Last words / James Merrill ; Music is in the piano only when it is played / Jack Gilbert ; Coda / Jason Shinder ; Litany / Aracelis Girmay ; Notes from the other side / Jane Kenyon ; Self-portrait / Charles Wright ; The mother / Anne Stevenson ; Did this ever happen to you / Franz Wright ; An Arundel tomb / Philip Larkin ; Poem for a survivor / Donald Justice ; Letter from God / Ruth L. Schwartz ; Otherwise / Jane Kenyon ; To breath / Kenneth Koch ; Train ride / Ruth Stone.