By Lisa McMurtray. Special to the Clarion-Ledger Sunday print edition (June 3)

Loss, however sudden or slow, is unimaginable. Yet in her sixth collection of poetry, Angela Ball tackles this painful subject beautifully with longing, lyricality, dark humor, and keen intelligence.

Underscored by the sudden death of Ball’s long-time partner, each poem in Talking Pillow is touched by this loss, either in the way that it reshapes the world around what is no longer in it, reimagines the past, or simply tries to find a way forward. “How is (s)he taking it,” one poem asks, and it is this question that drives the collection. How does one cope with death’s intrusion? In a way, Talking Pillow is the answer to this question, acting as a protection against forgetting, fear, and, however temporary, loneliness.

“Although / divers can learn to cope with the effects,” Ball writes in one poem, “it is not possible to / develop a tolerance.” Throughout Talking Pillow, Ball resists easy conclusions. Instead, she revisits death, folding and unfolding it into new shapes, not to tolerate it, but to better understand its effects. She does not ask why, but notes that “Cognitive dissonance / happens for a reason. Can make us // break up or down.” At turns avoiding and confronting loss, these poems capture what comes after and how, if at all, one moves on.

There are numerous ways to cope, and Ball explores many of them through richly textured, sharply funny imagined scenarios, addresses to characters like Robert Frost and Anna Akhmatova, and poems full of violence just beneath the surface and poems that are almost playful. Ball recontextualizes death not to make it more manageable, but to come at it from different angles. “If you go for a drive, know,” Ball writes, “that small roadside crosses / contain your friends, re-mastered.”

It is not until the middle of the book that the central death unfolds. “Arrived at Emergency,” Ball writes of her partner’s illness, “the first of grief’s little rooms.” There, she is warned, “’Always assume they can hear.’” Later, Ball revisits this advice, pleading, “Let me hear that Michael hears. / In his fashionable Tiny House.”

These poems embody grief’s little rooms and Michael’s Tiny House, giving voice to grief and heartache. This voice begs and worries. “Michael was scandalously / alone,” the poem continues, “then more / much more alone.” At the heart of the book, this elegy lays closest to death and the emptiness after it. After, Ball writes, “I travel, searching the perfect vacancy. / I have sent memories out ahead. They gleam.”

Perhaps, as Ball writes, “The trick…is to see others.” She suggests in another poem, “We depart and workarounds kick / in…creaky but functional, how things move / or refuse.” Grappling with sudden loss, these poems ask what to do next. “You say it’s hard to join the hours, / you’ve lost the plot,” she writes, before giving a series of instructions not on how to move on, but how to appear as if one has moved on. “Do not put baklava into a briefcase,” the poem commands, but instead, “Think how privileged you are / to seldom stand waiting / for a car to come.”

Rife with conflict between control and forgiveness, anger and acceptance, Ball notes that in the end:

We were not
pretty. Our work was close,
the day, a thread
knotted at one end.

Grief, it seems, is putting one line after another, day by day. In the last poem of the book, Ball writes of a bicycle accident: “All was dark / then I got up and started riding again.” Eventually we move forward, but before we can, we must sit with loss and try to understand it intimately. What better way than through the words of these poems and Ball’s immense talent?

Born and raised in Jackson, Lisa McMurtray holds an MFA from Florida State University and an MA in English from Mississippi State University. Her poems have appeared in The Cincinnati Review, Ninth Letter, West Branch and The Journal.

Angela Ball will appear at the Mississippi Book Festival Aug. 18 as a participant in the “Waxing Poetic with the Pros” poetry panel at 9:30 a.m. in the State Capitol Room 201 A.

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