Such Sweet Sorrow

By Richard Bell

‘With this moving free verse arising from his sustained encounter with his wife’s cancer, Richard Bell lays bare the intimate reality of loss, from its dark foreshadowing in her fatal diagnosis through the rigors of her treatment to the persistence of her presence even in the yawning absence that followed her death.  In raw hone

• Language: English
• Publisher: Debbie Lee
• Release date: Feb 14, 2019
• ISBN: 9781760416881

Richard Bell

Richard Bell teaches Early American history at the University of Maryland. He has received several teaching prizes and major research fellowships including the National Endowment for the Humanities Public Scholar Award. His first book, We Shall Be No More: Suicide and Self-Government in the Newly United States, was published in 2012. He is also the author of Stolen: Five Free Boys Kidnapped into Slavery and Their Astonishing Odyssey Home.

Book preview

Such Sweet Sorrow

Such Sweet Sorrow

Richard Bell

Ginninderra Press

Such Sweet Sorrow

ISBN 978 1 76041 688 1

Copyright © Richard Bell 2019

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All rights reserved. No part of this ebook may be reproduced, distributed or transmitted in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the copyright holder. Requests for permission should be sent to the publisher at the address below.

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First published 2019 by

Ginninderra Press

PO Box 3461 Port Adelaide 5015 Australia

www.ginninderrapress.com.au

Created with Vellum Created with Vellum

Contents

Preface

Such Sweet Sorrow

Preface

In 1969, we decided to marry two days after we first kissed. Two weeks later, we married on the way to university, three weeks before the final exams. For the next forty-five years, we leisurely repented together. In 2014 Sue was diagnosed with a rare cancer. I wrote a few poems at the time, and I wrote some more in the last days of her life in December 2016. But most were written in the next eight months. To paraphrase Walt Whitman,

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I love another,

now my love is no longer returned –

yet out of this I have written these poems.

Such Sweet Sorrow

On being told

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There is a point on the path of life

where the inevitability of death becomes real.

We were sort of at that point the evening

you came home and said you had cancer.

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It was a winter’s evening and darkening,

you walked straight past

the middle room where I was reading,

and into the kitchen