Fifty-four years ago on a May morning, I arrived at my high school to be waylaid by friends. They told me a boy of our acquaintance had had an “accident.” Shortly afterward, another friend told me that he was found dead the previous evening, in his family home’s garage, the car running and the doors closed.

Spring of 1968 had seen the deaths of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy. And now, this boy, the step-son of my favorite teacher, a boy I admired, was dead. Add to this mix my mother’s entering the hospital, and finding her medications were harming her, she was taken off them, resulting in illness, weight loss, hair loss. Summer found me depressed.

Some years later I realized that every spring I was haunted by those deaths and near deaths. And in 1986, I wrote a poem about this boy become a ghost, “who could not rest nor resurrect,” rising each spring to “melt my fortress forgetfulness.”

such an act will always remain…up to the ones left behind to…yet the hauntings…could be prevented in the first place. XXXIII

Every April, a requiem, a re-awakening of dawn, the same chorus & players. The garage door sealed, gas turned on & the girl… XXXV

from Asylum by Jill Bialosky
Jill Bialosky’s poems deeply affected me. The loss of her younger sister to suicide permeates these poems.

“Why couldn’t I save her,” she asks in CII. As I had wondered about this boy, who would come into the school newspaper room and argue and talk with our teacher, holding his camera. He was older, smarter, outgoing. A friend asked him if he would date me, and he said he would consider it if he didn’t have a girlfriend. Could I have saved him if we were together? Two years later I had another class with his stepfather, a brilliant, progressive teacher. I could not connect the suicide with this man. I had heard that the boy and his dad argued. Could my teacher have prevented his death?

XXXII
Like just awaking
drenched, they persist,
ghosts in our poems,
ghosts in our imaginations,
ghosts in our waking hours, ghosts
who elude philosophers, poets,
scientists, psychiatrists,
therapists & doctors, ghosts
who perpetuate,
who guileless,
will not keep quiet,
who preside over the populace,
& unknowingly rob
the living, ghosts,
who made their own house
their gallows, Dante says,
will never rest.

Asylum by Jill Bialosky

I left my ghost behind after naming it. Then, I hardly knew that boy. Bialosky lost a sister. They shared a life. Her ghost remains. “What if it is those who survive who never rest?” she asks in LXII.

Other ghosts haunt her. Those lost in the Holocaust. George Floyd. The immigrant children in pens, those seeking asylum and safety finding cages and no sanctuary. Winters become a memory. A baby dies in a fire. The virus and quarantine.

And yet life persists. Pollen thickening the air. The diseased tree cut down sends up sprouts. “things hidden from us,” to which “we mist surrender our trust, the flap of a butterfly wing, for instance, could change the balance of the universe.” (X)

IXX describes listening to a concert that included Johann Strauss II’s waltz Artist’s Life, “composed after Austria’s defeat in battle,/the melody meant to infuse breath into bleakness, elegy into declaration/creation into harmony,/even in a time of ravage & war.”

I listened to Artist’s Life, the hesitation and flowering into happiness and joy, the drama of it, the pure joy of it.

There is pain in these lines. “Abandon hope all ye who enter here” stands at the gates of Dante’s hell, but could also refer to being alive. And yet…life persists, and that alone gives us hope.

I received a free book from the publisher. My review is fair and unbiased. ( )

This book has some very interesting things to say through poetry. It's a really interesting mix of the poet's personal tragedies mixed with those of others, as well as a larger connection to collective memory and inherited trauma and sometimes the tiny lights of hope in that dark. I love the way she mixes nature imagery with human storytelling, and how she switches between nature and civilization. It almost feels like it mirrors an epic poem. Also, I really enjoyed the Bialosky's use of dual/multiple meanings of words (as in bodies for both water and people, or the multiple meanings of asylum).

I'd recommend this for anyone who is interested in nature poetry, personal histories and language with the caveat that the subject matter is heavy and includes infant mortality, suicide and the holocaust. ( )