“No one knows the ways / we let each other go.”
There is a particular philosophy in ikebana, the traditional art of Japanese flower arranging, called tenchijin, a rule of thirds that strives to capture three vital components, a fundamental principle of design: the heavens, the earth, and humanity. Always, the highest point represents the heavens, the lowest point, the earth. Humanity is constantly caught in the middle, with the idea that each vase acts not only as a miniature reflection of the world, but of our own place within it. Each arrangement is a challenge of consolidating space, lines, and depth, and can take a lifetime to perfect.
In the same way, The Grief Committee Minutes by Sarah Carey is a book that inhabits these in-betweens with mastery. Carey’s poems, gorgeous and cathartic, reflect this awareness of being birthed into the world, observing it, but also of being observed, by trees and birdsong that will outlive us. Humanity remains caught between earth and sky, Carey observes, though she also confesses, “where I’d given up on dancing, / in the span of seconds and eternity, // a single swallowtail glides.” These poems bridge that gap, hovering in that space of grief that treads onward both during a loved one’s illness and after their death.
As Carey takes us by the hand and unfurls herself to us, we are plunged into the thick of the woods of memory–and her menagerie of wolves, egrets, and Brazilian pepper trees–as she reveals her losses, from her mother’s Alzheimer’s and eventual passing to the death of her father. The poems, some lofty, some down-to-earth, mirror the quiet ache of mourning in its various stages, and Carey acts as a guide for us to traverse the terrain of grief together. Thus, the opening poem, “The Grief Committee,” acts as a perfect prelude for what’s to come:
...Human ad-hocs
register petitions of forgiveness, a fresh start,
each beating heart and memory preservedin the meeting minutes. By her muted feathers
you’ll discern the young, red-shouldered hawk,a fixture on your backyard post,
facing the scene of her last kill,while the grief committee chairs, the cranes,
who see it all, as sandhills do, plan the annual gala—
From cranes to egrets to chickadees, the writer’s stirring descriptions of birds function as a strong objective correlative not only of grief but also of the way that Carey finds to consider the world around her in all its mutability and liminality. The “Grief Committee” with its avian members, revealed to us from the start, sets up this tangible motif of grief for the reader that then resurfaces over and over each time a different bird is introduced. Carey makes these feelings that are downright difficult into something real, accessible, and relatable, like gazing out a window into the woods, now and then catching one’s own reflection. Grief isn’t some distant phenomenon, and her birds, though very real, often flit into the abstract and out again, transcending the boundaries from Carey to us, the red-shouldered hawk not only on her backyard post, but ‘yours’.
As we’re taken on these birdwatching stints, Carey’s astute sensitivity of the world shines through. Rather than startling the birds with an overbearing presence, Carey handles her grief with a certain restraint that exposes our wonderful smallness. In turn, we too are then opened up to the world’s vastness and the sheer velocity at which it hurtles through change, with or without us.
Any student of ikebana brave enough to recreate the cosmos knows these two things: that humanity is not the center of the world, and to not stuff the universe full of flowers. Rather, beauty lies in the subtraction. In absence. An asymmetrical, yet perfect balance, of what is there and what isn’t. One of the most striking features of The Grief Committee Minutes that leans into the liminal is a handful of poems that are written from non-human perspectives.
Whether it’s a beach house, lamenting the absence of its owner; a loblolly pine standing by a familiar home; a honeyeater crossing the threshold into extinction with a lament “like tolling bells, some said, commenting / how my sorrow reshaped air,” these point-of-view poems blur the lines of the self as Carey enmeshes herself into the world around her and with the reader themselves, creating living metaphors within which snatches of memory—her mother, her father, her childhood—can be found. It’s easy to let grief tilt over into self-indulgence, but in removing herself from the spotlight, Carey allows her cranes flying outside the window to be my cranes; her grief, my grief. I found myself immersed right along with her, walking through the houses of her parents, picking up and setting down objects that I realized with a pang outlasted their owners. The significance of absence looms deep, encased in what they’d left behind. Here a clock, there a handbag, empty houses and silent trees that bear witness.
The bedside lamp you read beside until midnight
burns for you tonight. When you moved from earthto dust or starlight—if it matters—
fronds from a silk palm in the bedroombrushed another lover’s shoulder passing
in the night. They would tell you touchremembers touch. No one knows the ways
we let each other go.And the birds, the longer we watch, begin to morph into mirrors, their cries into ours. The pileated woodpecker calls, “I live for what the dead give.” The last of the Kauai honeyeaters, now extinct, sings “and if you need a hook to hang a hope on, / tell yourself I’m never really gone.” This aching faith Carey grasps through these different voices, yet never failing to come down to earth and speak with her own; “We could be forgiven for a little hope / we’ll one day see lost loves again, / our dolorifuge...”
It is no light undertaking to sit with this kind of aching faith, this kind of grief, and it was difficult for me to read this book in long sittings. That ended up being to the good: I had to savor the poems in handfuls to allow for the richness to absorb. Carey demonstrates her artistry not only within each stand-alone poem, but the way she unifies her work into a cohesive whole, creating an overarching narrative that helped anchor my experience of reading in small snatches. It is subtle, but the trajectory of the book reflects the chronological “seasons” of grieving, moving through the inevitable loss of loved ones and into a period of mourning and processing, all the while revealing patches of memories so that the reader can slowly consolidate Carey’s personal experiences, as well as reflect on their own. Some poems are more subtle, hidden away in more elevated descriptions. For instance, in “Reverse Universe,” Carey shoots us into the stars before bringing us crashing down to this intimate moment:
Astronomers say space expands,
contracts, but I’m content to move
what little ways I can, to spill the secrets
of my light years when my dying father asks me
how I’m doing, asks for coffee,
and I slide it from the Keurig with my good handfill the mug halfway with whole milk,
something stirred we have no words for.
Others are straightforward about the events in Carey’s life. Indeed, rather than skirting around the pain with some abstract metaphor, she addresses her mother’s passing outright. I found that I needed those moments of respite from ambiguity, from complexity. Grief, though a complex emotion, needs simplicity to make sense of it too:
Her last night as a breathing
entity, my mother skirrs into the sky
like a flock of seabirds startled from shellfish by dog...
Whether the reader lives by the sea with its birds or in some other climate, Carey lends us her grief and her perspective, and that is a consolation. But I don’t want to give more away, as this book is meant for each reader to discover on their own, with whatever birds are native to them, with whatever losses are unique to them. Even so, The Grief Committee Minutes understands that all of us have these moments, caught in the midst of life, neither here nor there. All of us have our own hopes that we might one day regain what has gone. All of us know, sometimes clearly and sometimes less so, that life goes on; time creaks forward, bearing loss and healing with it. The world might not be as it was when it belonged to our mothers, but it belongs to us.
A swallow flits past the window, breath fogs on the glass and obscures the trees we climbed as children in our yards, and we are reminded we live still. “The ritual never gets old.” In this world of noise, Carey’s book is a sanctuary that invites the heart to unfold itself to loss. To sit. To remember. To listen to the birds.
Chantale Van Tassel was born and raised in Hong Kong in an American-Taiwanese household. Her multicultural background has often found its way into her writing, in which she enjoys exploring the nuances and histories of language and place. Chantale is currently in Michigan pursuing her undergraduate studies in Linguistics, Writing, and Asian Studies.