Poetry
Category: Individual Collections, Poetry
Number of pages: 60
ISBN: 9781781727508
Publication date: April 8, 2024
Price: £10.99
Carrie Etter’s Grief’s Alphabet is a shattering elegy for the poet’s mother, opening a pathway through grief in spite of the impossible task of expressing such a loss. The collection evokes the complex, intimate relationship of a mother and daughter and thus the magnitude of the mother’s death.
The collection begins both chronologically and alphabetically with ‘An Adoption in 360°’, ‘Bigamy,’ etc., an order which breaks down quickly in the face of loss. The early poems portray the family from its beginnings with the narrator’s adoption through adolescence, addressing experiences of bereavement, poverty, attempted suicide, and teenage pregnancy in such vivid poems as ‘The House of Two Weathers, or the Years after the Layoff’ and ‘Pregnant Teenager & Her Mama.’
The second section, ‘The Brink,’ wrenchingly conveys the mother’s unexpected death and the banal yet painful aftermath of sorting clothes, finding the will, and arranging the funeral, as well as the first excruciating months of mourning. The final section, ‘Orphan Age,’ presents life after loss through the long work of grieving. Memories return involuntarily in ‘the whiff of not quite nostalgia’ in ‘M Is Usually Memory and Occasionally McDonald’s’ and in familiar food in ‘Ode to Tuna Casserole.’ The abecedarian title poem, ‘Grief’s Alphabet,’ brings together the whole, from the mother’s disappointed aspiration to become a teacher, to her abrupt decline, to the speaker’s grief, regret, and renewal.
In its raw yet deft evocation of a mother and daughter’s relationship, Grief’s Alphabet celebrates love in the same breath as it weeps for its loss.
Carrie Etter
American expatriate Carrie Etter has published four collections of poetry, including The Tethers (Seren, 2009), winner of the London New Poetry Prize, and Imagined Sons (Seren, 2014), shortlisted for the Ted Hughes Award for New Work in Poetry. She also edited Infinite Difference: Other Poetries by UK Women Poets (Shearsman, 2010), a TLS Book of the Year, and Linda Lamus’s posthumous collection, A Crater the Size of Calcutta (Mulfran, 2015). Individual poems have appeared in The Guardian, The New Republic, The New Statesman, The Penguin Book of the Prose Poem, Poetry Review, and The Times Literary Supplement. She also writes short stories, essays, and reviews, and has received grants from Arts Council England and The Society of Authors. After many years teaching at Bath Spa University, in 2022 Etter joined the creative writing faculty at the University of Bristol.
Photo Credit: Fabrizia Costa.
“Etter has succeeded in writing a deeply personal collection, which at the same time is notable for its lyrical precision and variety of poetic styles when thinking about grief in all its different guises. Grief’s Alphabet is a deeply memorable and evocative poetic tribute.”
Maria Taylor, Everybody’s Reviewing
“Writing poems about death and grieving is an almost impossible task but Etter has managed to carefully walk the tightrope between mawkishness, confession and bewilderment. Her words combine vulnerability and emotion with a writerly detachment, seeing anew and documenting the struggle with ‘not falling face first into woe.’ This is brave, powerful, moving poetry that has clearly been fought for every step of the way.”
Rupert Loydell, Tears in the Fence
“Divided into sections that both encounter grief in the aftermath of death, and measure its effects in the downdraft of the present, Grief’s Alphabet is a lexicon of not forgetting, informed by thirteen years of bereavement, a lifetime of hindsight, and an unwillingness to open clenched fingers…”
Steve Whittaker, The Yorkshire Times
“Etter has captured the rawness of grief and the complexity of distance, whether geographical or as an adopted child. With tenderness and compassion, Grief’s Alphabet vocalises that keening in the immediacy of death and its aftermath.”
Emma Lee
“An impassioned reckoning with the aftermath of Etter’s adoptive parents’ deaths. Etter has the ability to floor you as she explores guilt (‘The errant daughter an ocean away’), and makes everyday observations that are anything but banal: “I collect and collect: the novel from her bedside, / bookmark never to advance.” She is particularly good at showing how finding a language for grief is close to impossible; one poem runs in its entirety, ‘F Is for Fuck This.’’’
Rishi Dastidar, The Guardian
“Etter performs a painfully remarkable magic trick: she gives a voice to ‘soundless keening,’ the grief that cannot speak.”
Caroline Bird
“Carrie Etter is in top form, singing an elegy for her mother, one that is as wise as it is heartbreaking.”
Connie Voisine
“…cinematic and technically adroit, they are above all a love song”
Julia Copus
“The lucky reader of Grief’s Alphabet is offered care and sweetness alongside blood and axle grease. Mourning tastes of love. Expansive and rebellious”
Anthony (Vahni) Capildeo
