Fierce Day

In this remarkable new collection, her first in over a decade, Rose Styron confronts the death of her husband—step by step—in jewel-like poems. Seldom has a poet been so attuned to the ways in which, under the pressure of grief, time both opens and shuts—letting us into its minutes, shutting us out of its years. The instant, clock time, the half-hour, the day, the anniversary, sacred time, secular time, calendar time—all are opened up by love, loss, and most especially seasonal shifts that allow one glimpses of what an “afterlife” might be, or a way back into this life with a quickened sense of what joy might lie beyond grief. Winter deepens, early Spring asks the resistant heart to open, late Spring beckons asking the soul to relearn trust. By the time Summer arrives, this dazzling poet of summer has learned how to survive loss, how to see again, how to trust ever-treacherous, inevitably treacherous, time, as if it were one’s natural lover. It is a wise and gorgeous journey.