Description
Book SynopsisWith others in your absence tells the story of a return to the living, travelling out of the acuteness of grief into new ways of being towards others. Moving forwards and occasionally backwards in time, it celebrates the platonic relationships through which the speaker learns to readjust to a world made strange following the loss of a parent. Many of the poems are very loosely based on seasons 11–14 of the ‘classic’ series of Doctor Who, each drawing its title and imagery from a different serial.
Excerpt from '2017'
Joe and I are drinking too much Spanish lager in a bar in West Bridgford. It’s been eleven months: right now, I can no more elegise my dad than I could have called him ‘father’, and anyway, ‘dad’ sounds flat, like it belongs in that blunt universe in which the dead can’t be addressed as lyric people.
Joe reminds me that an elegy is something that you write when you’ve resolved your grief. I feel like an apple that’s fallen from a tree into a bed of roses in winter, skewered like a severed head upon a thorny stem, which is to say I am far from resolution.
Trade Review'With others in your absence’ is the second stunning pamphlet by poet Zosia Kuczyńska. And as a caveat, I should mention, that Zosia and I are friends, but that in no way impeaches my reading of these poems (it probably does).
The poems in this pamphlet explore the poet’s grief, following the loss of her father, and also, in Zosia’s own words in a video (link below) ‘the friendships that help you navigate that grief, to help you live with and through it.’
So, yes we have grief and friendships, but the other main character in these poems is the ‘classic’ series of Doctor Who (about which I know nothing and it definitely does not impeach my reading). Zosia elegises her father via Doctor Who because it was their shared territory: a ‘vocabulary of images’ that she has been gifted; a vessel. ‘The day is melted like a painted clock’ she says in ‘July 6’, ‘let’s dawdle brazenly’.
The second poem in this pamphlet (‘Here we go again’) made me weep, all of a sudden, in the queue to board my flight to Bristol this week and I've barely been able to read a poem since. Which is to say, I'm finding it difficult writing this critique; trying to find the words to say anything intelligent about these poems when each time I read one all I feel is emotion.
There’s an honesty in these poems, conveyed through language that is raw, open-hearted, simple, and yet at the same time, weaves around each part of itself, to complicate matters beyond (my current) comprehension: ' Imagine that my friends are patient with me; that they have offered me their ears and arms and company like Jelly Babies because I'm sad and we don't know what to do.' And I trust Zosia with my own ears and arms and put myself in her company, trusting her with the familiar (poetic) journey of grief.
‘Until we meet again we will / not meet again. Home is either coming or going / and I am always going. Until we meet again.’
-- Manuela Moser
