Böcker av Rachel Hadas

"What is there I will not let go?" asks the introductory poem in Ghost Guest. With effortless authority, Rachel Hadas's new collection keeps answering that question. Memories of places and people segue to elegies, which lead to meditations on art and poetry, mythology and, especially, teaching. Dreamy yet precise, celebratory yet attuned to mortality, these valedictory poems tell us exactly what crucial and intangible things Rachel Hadas will not let go.

In thirty-six poems written between February 2020 and July 2021, distinguished poet Rachel Hadas captures moments of her personal version of the first year and a half of the pandemic. With candor and elegance, these poems, which vary in form and mood, limn both the inner and outer landscapes of what the poet calls shared privacy. Like countless other people (and not only writers), Hadas has kept going partly by keeping track, striving to balance "our mortal mix of hope and love and dread." In the process, she has assembled a strong new collection.

Literary Nonfiction. "This beautiful prose collection strikes very deep notes. Rachel Hadas, known for her formal dexterity and intelligence, demonstrates here a remarkable fluency in moving from the disarmingly personal to the perceptively literary-critical, from the daily round to the ancient world, and from heartbreak to wonderment. Poetry is alive in her, as is a calm, humane attentiveness to the normalcy of grief and the possibilities of consolation." Phillip Lopate"As I read TALKING TO THE DEAD, I felt I was engaged in a wide- ranging, personal, pleasurable, and erudite conversation with Rachel Hadas herself. She is deft, as few others are, at integrating her deep scholarship with a compassionate understanding of the human and the humorous everyday, and as she turns her sharp eye, clear intelligence, and ready wit on subjects as various as Dante and dreams, Homer and Plath, snakes and centaurs, illness and invisibility, she never fails to surprise, stimulate, and satisfy both heart and mind." Lydia Davis"

A varied and generous sampling of more than a decade's worth of prose by an important poet

The central theme of The Golden Road is the prolonged dementia of the poet's husband. But Rachel Hadas's new collection sets the loneliness of progressive loss in the context of the continuities that sustain her: reading, writing, and memory; familiar places; and the rich texture of a life fully lived.