Levering Avenue
By Robert Daseler '67
University of Evansville Press, 1999 * 66 pp.
Meditations on Grief
Centered around the death of his wife, Michelle, these sonnets by Robert Daseler '67 are an expansive meditation on grief, loneliness, and the ambivalent push-pull of engagement with a world that lacks the very presence that once defined it.
Centered around the death of his wife, Michelle, these sonnets by Robert Daseler '67 are an expansive meditation on grief, loneliness, and the ambivalent push-pull of engagement with a world that lacks the very presence that once defined it.
The poems span the range of everyday human experience--the memory of shared dwellings, the fact of a garden grown to decay, the rhetoric of personal ads seeking companionship. This ordinariness of life becomes heightened as the sensibility of contemporary struggle and loss is lifted and rarefied by the rigors of the sonnet form.
This volume, which won the 1998 Richard Wilbur Award, has three parts. The first treats of the past--memories of a partner who was loved and assumed as an unquestioned presence. The second dances around the frustrations and anguish of being a single-parent. The third furthers the examination of loss and isolation, as the poems deepen into encounters with unstable reality, now that the geometry of perception has forever shifted.
In the final entry, "The Science of Grief," Daseler writes:
We have only just begun to scrape
Together all the bits and broken pieces
We require. Experience increases
In quality and clarifies in shape
Life's mystery and what we know of it.
A world of ignorance retreats as tears
Give way to facts, and in a hundred years
We will rise triumphantly above it:
Above the squalid guilt and loneliness,
Above the desolation in our hearts.
No longer will we meekly acquiesce
To grief but will push it to the wall
Until we have it tamed, and it departs,
Inconsequential, mute, ephemeral.
With this Chekhovian charge, one comes away with an energized sense of purpose, the fact of loss and grief put to work to transform human suffering into something we can use, to understand not only how to continue but the reason for the effort, despite and because of the decay in the garden. Daseler seems to invite such a challenge with the volume's epigraph, from Robert Louis Stevenson's "The Lantern-Bearers": "For to miss the joy is to miss all. In the joy of the actors lies the sense of any action. That is the explanation, that the excuse."
--Kathleen Dimmick '72
Kathleen Dimmick '72, directs plays and teaches theatre at Bard College and the New School for Social Research in New York City.
