The Same Book

We all go there eventually,

taken by the dark god from the green

meadow life must seem as one is departing

toward another meadow…

--Alison Townsend, from “The Meadow”

In February, my father died. He had Parkinson’s and was battling dementia. He fell down on the stairs, hit his head, and never recovered consciousness.

We had talked on the phone less than two weeks before his death. He had called to tell me that the book of poetry I’d sent him for Christmas, the book he’d saved to read for his vacation, was “magnificent.” He told me how it fed his soul, how wise the speaker was and how vulnerable, how vivid the author’s images. He told me he loved it, and he thanked me for sending it to him.

The book was Alison Townsend’s Persephone in America, which I’d finally bought after teaching her poem “What I Never Told You About the Abortion” in a coursepack for two semesters. I don’t know why it took me so long to seek out more of her work—perhaps a fear that the other poems wouldn’t stand up to the one I knew?—or why I chose to search for it when I did. But I had read it in the fall, and I loved it.

It is sometimes difficult to share the books we really love, books that aren’t just well-written and beautiful but that fit into some space in us we didn’t even know was there. I don’t think I could teach the whole book, because I might actually cry in class if a student were to criticize it, flipping through the pages and saying, “Honestly, I don’t see what the big deal is about.” Or maybe I would lash out, saying, “The big deal? The big deal is about how these poems show a girl’s life spinning out after a rape, a woman’s sudden hollow despair, a curving desire for familiar landscape and a stranger’s startling affirmation in the crosswalk. The big deal is about how we are the speaker in these poems, and the girl, and the stranger. The big deal is about poetry that matters, that goddamn means something instead of just playing around with its own cleverness and blasé.”

But when I sent the book to my father, I did so because I needed to send him a Christmas present, and because he was a poet and a reader of poetry, and because I wanted the gift to help keep alive our connection to each other, tenuous and strained as that connection sometimes was. I sent it to him because he knew about the labyrinths of despair, as I did, as Alison Townsend did, and because when a book can help you take in just one big lungful of air—scented, perhaps, with hay and sunset—you look around for someone to share it with.

And so I mean this small essay as a thank you, to Alison Townsend, to writers and writing that challenge and define and question and shape us. Because of this book, I had something real to talk about with my father when he called. I had the joy and satisfaction of having chosen just the right gift. And when he died, suddenly, I knew he had been happy, he had been feeling, if not whole, then at least less hollow than he sometimes did; and though never of us were ready for him to leave this green meadow, we had walked together in it for a while, holding the same book in our hands.

This essay was written by Katherine Riegel. Her debut collection of poetry, Castaway, is forthcoming from FutureCycle Press.