Less Fourtunate Pirates

Bryan Borland

This is a difficult and beautiful book about a father’s death, a son’s grief. Like Sharon Olds’ The Father, the book is organized around that one central loss and the way that loss knocks a world out of orbit. And like Tennyson, Borland is a writer driven over and over to write and rewrite his grief in one short burst of song after another, each holiday a touchstone, each new task an occasion for memory. But this is grief in a new age, as the poem “Social Network Obituary,” with its heartbreaking status posts, reminds us. In the poem “The Fourth of July,” after a fireworks accident, a boy discovers that his father is not “made of something more than me.” That this revelation comes on Independence Day is surely no accident, for what seems to be a book driven by loss is also a book threaded with transformations. The poems that recognize the changed relationships with the writer’s mother and lover are among the most poignant.

status	Copy #1 (6013): in
genre	Literature and Fiction » Poetry
publisher	Sibling Rivalry Press
publish date	2012
popularity	checked out 0 time(s)