Venice Suite

Book excerpt: Written in the aftermath of the death of his wife in 2010, The venice Suite is a deeply personal sequence of poems that charts the author's experience of sudden bereavement. It explores the stages and states of loss in an irrevocably altered world, where one partner is left behind to deal with the ongoing business of living while trying to comprehend the enormity of the severance of a shared life suddenly rendered into the past tense. They manage to be richly tender love poems while trying to map the unknown new territory in which any bereaved person finds themselves. Book jacket.