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'His Grief Is The Plague': Poetry Of Loss And The Risk Of Losing One's Readers, Michael R. Jacklin

Faculty of Law, Humanities and the Arts - Papers (Archive)

The book Lalomanu (2010), by Jorge Salavert, is a collection of poetry written in response to the death of the author’s six-year-old daughter Clea, one of the victims of the tsunami which swept ashore in Samoa, American Samoa and Tonga in September 2009. Lalomanu is a deeply moving account of grief and mourning, a book that its author knows will be too painful for some to read. As Salavert points out in his poems, most people he knows seem afraid of his grief; they are unable to respond to, or acknowledge, its intensity. And yet, in its expressions of grief …