Tenebrae: A Memoir of Love and Death
From the Foreword by Matthew Lippman:
"Dan Flanigan is a visionary poet. His series of poems, Tenebrae: A Memoir of Love and Death, based on an ancient service sometimes performed in the Roman Catholic Church, grapples with the death of his wife. In these poems he takes the reader on the journey that his wife endured, and he with her, in her wrenching passage from life to death. I initially read his manuscript sometime ago but still I am filled with its humanity, its depth of vision, and imagination. One of the things that resonates with me most is how willing he was to explore the hardest stuff in order to find his voice. He found it. These poems are some of the most moving poems I have ever read about death. What he has created is astonishing. There is a humanity at the core of these pieces that shakes the reader to the bone. They are moving. They are elegiac. They are celebratory. If sadness and solitude make for big art, these poems are big art. But they are more than that--they are the human heart in a singular and authentic voice. Flanigan's poetry is everything that I think of when I think of what poetry should be--playful, intelligent, of the personal and the universal simultaneously. So, while the poems have a confessional air to them, they are completely of us, for us, the world at large.
Other of the poems in this book focus on family, on history, on his Irish heritage. In particular, there is a piece entitled "San Josef Bay, Cape Scott, Vancouver Island," which recounts a walk and conversation between a father and his young daughter. The writing in the prose poem is magical, haunting, and utterly sublime because of what Dan says and does not say all at once. He has that ability, that talent, to know what not to say, to impose silence into a piece, the unsaid, in order to say more, in order to garner the most powerful emotional effect possible.
This is Dan Flanigan's power--his poetry is an emotional poetry. It is not a sentimental poetry, though. It gets at the heart of the heart and tears things up to build them back up. It is a smart poetry. The ethos of his voiceis strong. When you read his work, you feel like you are in the hands of a master craftsperson, in the hands of a poet who has figured out the big and gorgeous balance between 'here and there' at the same time. Like the Tenebrae poems, his other pieces, though different in subject matter, come from the same well-spring and express, again, the depth of humanity that is so heartbreaking and exquisite in his work.
Dan Flanigan's poems are for the world, for every man and woman who wants to know more about the beauty and the suffering that are in a state of constant collision."
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"Dan Flanigan is a visionary poet. His series of poems, Tenebrae: A Memoir of Love and Death ... grapples with the death of his wife. In these poems he takes the reader on the journey that his wife endured, and he with her, in her wrenching passage from life to death. ... What he has created is astonishing. There is a humanity at the core of these pieces that shakes the reader to the bone. They are moving. They are elegiac. They are celebratory ... they are the human heart in a singular and authentic voice. Flanigan's poetry is ... playful, intelligent, of the personal and the universal simultaneously ... they are completely of us, for us, the world at large."
..". magical, haunting, and utterly sublime ..."
..". heartbreaking and exquisite ..." --From the Foreword by Matthew Lippman Author of A Little Gut Magic, The New Year of Yellow, Monkey Bars, Salami Jew, and American Chew
"Grief transformed into verse, but no less painful. Poignant and a brutally honest reckoning but also a celebration of a life." C.P
"Written as a tribute to his beloved wife and partner in life, the author takes the reader into seldom explored terrain, the mysterious time between living and dying...the author's free verse style and dream like writing makes the story that unfolds seem more like a mysterious journey which has several twists and turns that reveal unexpected events which they both experience, each in their own way, but within a cocoon of support, comfort and unconditional love that only these two people can understand and share." E.B.
..".I heard about this on a podcast, downloaded it on a whim, and ended up reading the entire thing on my phone in an evening.
This is the only modern poetry I've read on this subject, and it engrossed me." J.S.
"What I love most...it made me enjoy reading poetry again; and even, sometimes, reading it aloud. The TRUTH in the feelings of these poems underpins the language and the form of his work--sometimes free verse, held together by rhythm and by consonance ('Sonora'); sometimes in prose poems. Speaking of which, '72d and Amsterdam' is prose in form and poetic in language and inspiration. "A Trip to the Underworld' references a Greek Classic but uses the idea with sardonic humor to deal with a painful end-of-life experience: the rapid loss of a wife after many years of marriage and struggle and family. That sense of struggle is masterfully presented in 'Quills: ' the poem resonates for me as a contrast with a song both the poet and I are familiar with: 'Muskrat Love'...In 'The Second Theological Virtue" there is the wonderful line: 'Hope is much crueler than despair.' Enough said: I am getting back to my reading and reciting and thinking. This is what modern poetry can be: honest and not precious; technically strong but not academic; available like that of Robert Frost; worth re-reading." J.E.
