Life, after life—from epitaph to epilogue: Review by Blaine Marchand

   The title of this latest collection of poetry by A. Garnett Weiss is a perfect one. With words drawn from obituaries, the poet creates tankas that are exquisitely beautiful, insightful, compelling and haunting.

   Obituaries at one time were notices to the public that rather starkly gave the bare-bone information –immediate family, place and time of visitation and the funeral arrangements. In our era, obituaries have become life stories of the recent dearly departed. In this small elegantly designed book, A. Garnett Weiss advances remembrance a step further and in a new direction.

   As explained in the Preface, “every poem… takes words and phrases, unaltered, from death notices and obituary articles published in Toronto’s Globe and Mail over a six year-period.” But it is how the poet arranges these words that give new life to the descriptive for those who have passed on to the next. Through creative re-imaging by the poet, these tankas are a gift of them to us, the readers,

   In this secular era when people are cremated and ashes are scattered, there are fewer and fewer monuments with inscription. However, these epilogues are tributes that encapsulate the nuances and fleeting moments that shape human life and emotions. At the end of the book are what the poet calls markers, by which the given names of the persons and the obituary tributes are cited for each tanka.

   In traditional tanka (which in Japanese means a short song or poem), there are five lines. In this case, three lines followed by a space and then two lines, which serve as a coda. The tanka form is a prism to refract human relationships and emotions. Nature, metaphors, and similes, are optical elements that compose the full spectrum of the poet’s insights. And A. Garnett Weiss succeeds absolutely.

   A perfect example of this is the poem, An Embrace, in which Weiss explores the connection between the human voice and the story it preserves.

   In these tankas, Weiss continually delights and astonishes in how she crafts the flow of the chosen words when like reflective prisms they flip, invert, and rotate the meaning of the gathering of words in five lines. Over and over, these poems literally take one’s breath away, which is indeed a fit metaphor for such a book.

   Kudos also to Julie McNeill for her design and to Allan Briesmaster of Aeolus House for bringing it to a wider public.

To order your signed copy, go to www.jcsulzenko.ca, or send a query to infosulzenko@gmail.com.