The Place Where Grief Begins by Christopher Hirschmann Brandt (review)

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Reviewed by:

• The Place Where Grief Begins by Christopher Hirschmann Brandt
• Patricia Laurence (bio)

the place where grief begins Christopher Hirschmann Brandt
Tebot Bach
https://www.spdbooks.org/Products/9781939678928/the-place-where-grief-begins.aspx
65 pages; Print, $17.00

The Place Where Grief Begins is a collection of poems in memory of Barbara Vann, the founder of the wonderful Medicine Show Theater and other Maine and New York companies. Christopher Brandt worked with Vann for forty-three years, joining the company in 1973 and serving in different capacities from administrator to set designer and builder to writer to actor. After Vann's death in 2015, he managed the company until its closing in 2020.

The heartfelt, poignant poems of friendship and love in this volume—elegies—are tributes to Vann's "genius," her beauty, their love, and her teaching; importantly, they attest to the continued "presence" of Vann's absence. Brandt writes:

I know now how it was with OrpheusThough I lack his lyreI would strip my spirit nakedBefore the god of death to beg her back.

He asserts in the title poem, "The Place Where Grief Begins," that

that placeis no placefor tears

The poems evolve through various stages of love, death, and grief. There is sensual celebration, as the speaker says she is "burned" into his flesh. In "Goddesses" he celebrates "touch":

Hold me holding you, for it is but in touchof flesh on flesh, in smell and taste, [End Page 119] in fleeting things, in all that is put outby death, that we can ride the sky like gods.

He recounts everyday pleasures during her illness in "Putting on Your Socks":

will they fit? They do, a treat. Yourwarm tee shirt

But then, in the grip of death,

My love grows too weak to stand upBy herself …. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .Later I hold her under her shouldersAnd lift her up. She is heavy alreadyWith death, though neither of usSpeaks the words.

We read of the denial of death as the speaker cries,

No! I will not let him take you.But suddenly I'm holding only bones.

There is an honesty in these sensuous poems, as Brandt holds onto his love as long as he can but admits to repulsion in "The Smell":

It was death before death had a name.The seeds of death were in her.They began to open their toxic blossoms.Purple.I backed away.She asked me why. I could not answer.

Recurrent images of water—the ebb and flow of life—appear as he remembers her swimming among brilliant mountains in one of the most beautiful lyrics in the book, "Water's Daughter":

She disturbs the water so little that geese and ducksswim placid beside her, she's not a beaver nor an otter,she's a woman, and she's water's daughter. [End Page 120]

Water is a medium into which they both slip as he asserts that "Water may be as close as we come / to paradise—the element we / cannot conquer." A quiet joy leaps into the natural hush of the moment:

dragonflies perch on our nosesas we float on our backs, watchingswallows weave the sky, feelingfish leap clear of the surface

Yet there is a hint—even here—of "the grave quiet of stone." The rhythmic alternation of light and heavy—the images of water as life and light and stone as death and heaviness—pervade this collection, reflecting the shifting moods of sorrow that we read of in many poems of mourning. There are parallel streams of feeling: remembering the movement and the pleasures of life—the body, laughter, fun, creativity, and now the pain and heaviness of loss by its side.

In memory, the woman in these poems is light, and always slipping away as the poet reaches out like Orpheus to hold her back. He is heavy, and his heart is symbolized by the stone he takes from her house after her death, "The Stone I Took." He moves it from line to line in easy enjambments. The stone is like a tombstone:

It is large and heavy...