The severing of an intimate relationship means giving up a vision of life together. One mourns the beloved, the shared past, and the expected future, but what is often overlooked, and equally painful, is the loss of a version of the self. It is this last shattering that tricks us into rebirth.
The end of a relationship becomes the entrance to the rest of our lives. Sometimes an awakening is a catalyst of the breakup—the version of the self that entered the relationship is no longer recognizable. Other times, the breakup sparks an unexpected awakening.
Hidden parts of ourselves come into view. We meet a mysterious self, and it is she who learns to love again, as Galway Kinnell writes in his poem “Wait”: “The need for the new love is faithfulness to the old.” My new book The Going Is Forever travels through the dissolution of a marriage and the multiple endings that blur separation and intimacy. The poems push against the binaries of leaving and being left and embrace ongoing love in the wake of loss.
Friends and family often ask “what happened,” expecting a reason or a narrative. Attempting to answer, I often felt disingenuous, defensive, guilty, and most of all lonely. Poetry allowed me to confront the boundaries of privacy and disclosure, to recognize an allegiance more to paradox than to a person.
In a poem, it was possible to endure moments of not knowing, to hold versions of a life I had to let go of, and to break open to the life to come. Several of my favorite poetry collections capture the nuanced process of breaking up, with its extreme states of longing, anger, and sorrow—while also expanding the capacity for joy, pleasure, and compassion. The following books refuse to treat breakups as a singular ending or distinguish the breakup from the inevitable awakening.
When a relationship ends, language is as much of a casualty as love. Virginia Woolf speaks of “the little language such as lovers use.” We lose the person we talk to in secret, and from this devastating silence, poetry reinvents language. In non-linear lyric forms, the following collections braid love’s ruthless endings with its tenderest beginnings.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
