where we love. Home is where our journeys begin. And this is the story of my journey in grief after I lost my dear husband, Sam, and how poetry saved me when I was falling apart.” Out of her grief and loss, Lynn Clapp has written a short masterpiece that chronicles how she finally found her way home again with poetry as her map and the poets as her guides. “Poetry,” she writes, “is the language of grief.” The author is not reporting, explaining, researching, or even describing grief. To those who are grieving a great loss, this book will be a comfort precisely because it does not try to do the impossible, to beguile the grieving of their own grief. Grief over Sam’s death took Lynn from the comfort of their little home on Paradise Island in Nassau, Bahamas, to “the land of the dead.” While finding her own way home through poetry, she is ever mindful that “Grief is a solitary journey,” lamenting that, “Some people never return. They become wandering souls, lost and mourning forever.” In Part I “Requiem Aeternum,” (eternal rest), poetry arrives and T. S. Eliot, like Virgil in Dante’s Inferno, leads the author up and out of the land of the dead. In the background, the reader hears the faint, but unmistakable sounds of “Requiem in D Minor” as each chapter ends with haunting lines of comfort from Mozart’s “Mass for the Dead.” C. S. Lewis, Pablo Neruda, and Joseph Campbell make appearances along the way until the words: Let perpetual light shine upon them / Grant them eternal rest forever mark the moment when Lynn is able to depart the land of the dead by releasing Sam to eternal rest. Part II, “Vivere Aeternum” (eternal life), completes the journey home with the help of Alfred Lord Tennyson, Christina G. Rossetti, William Shakespeare, Dante Alighieri, F. T. Prince, and the Psalmist. Unnamed, but lurking is a Dickensian return to “Christmas Past” through Tennyson’s “In Memoriam #78” in which the author faces the painful reality that part of every memory from now on will be a bitter sweet reminder of what has been lost. Moving ever closer to home, Lynn’s journey continues. Though both Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet and Lewis’ A Grief Observed begin in love and end in tragedy, Lynn finds in them a balance and a oneness with all who grieve. Near the end, she addresses her readers directly: “So it is dear reader that I share with you Retuning Home: A Poetic Journey of Grief and Loss. This is my journey and your grief and loss is your journey, but in some way, it is our shared journey.” The paradox of the solitary journey of grief is that all who grieve are one. And it is in this oneness that those who are alone in the aloneness of grief can find comfort in reading and re-reading Lynn Clapp’s book.

Hide more