The Day of Shelly's Death: The Poetry and Ethnography of Grief by Renato Rosaldo

Abstract

Ondjaki Granma Nineteen and the Soviet’s Secret Stephen Henighan, tr. Biblioasis Ondjaki’s zany novel manages to tell a thought-provoking story without taking itself too seriously. The book is full of interesting characters who add vivacity to the story of a boy’s quest to keep his grandmother safe from a supposed Soviet threat. Full of energy, Ondjaki’s quirky writing style shines a revealing light on people and locale. Gregory Norminton Thumbnails Vagabond Voices / Dufour Gregory Norminton paints a picture of the world in a fresh, experimental way in his lively collection of short stories. He travels the world and explores new interpretations of history, challenging the standards of storytelling without failing to convey a complete narrative. Nota Bene in these poems are clever, fun, and avoid ponderousness. Time itself, as in so much modern poetry, is a topic of fascination and bewilderment; but O’Callaghan is a virtuoso poet, and his temporalities are also virtuosic, twinkling out of sight behind tales half-imagined and half-true, or proving themselves malleable to the poet’s hands: as he writes, “This world . . . We get older & find it less hard.” The world’s laws— of temporality, of gravity, of identity —are not so steadfast or “hard” as we may assume; in Seamus Heaney’s words, whatever is given can always be reimagined. O’Callaghan takes this dictum to heart. We catch ourselves wondering if his reality is simply more interesting than ours and feel eager to experience this superabundance of sounds, sights, events, emotions, among which the poet lives. We may also recall the glee of a very different poet, Louis MacNeice , at the drunkenness of things being various. O’Callaghan’s project is different from MacNeice’s, but the exuberance of the poet’s intonation, parallel to the profusion of stimuli and emotions that the outside world presses upon him, recalls this predecessor . O’Callaghan’s tongue-incheek moments, though, are purely his own, as a quickly sketched tableau ends with a riddle: “I lie to myself: / they’re not metaphors. / They are not metaphors.” What assumptions do we bring to a poetry that seems to rely so heavily upon event and image rather than metaphorical conceit? Is there a way of playing with metaphor so that, magically, both literal and figurative readings are balanced upon the tip of the poet’s pen? Conor O’Callaghan proves it possible in this rich and radiant collection of poems. Magdalena Kay University of Victoria, B.C. Renato Rosaldo. The Day of Shelly’s Death: The Poetry and Ethnography of Grief. Durham, North Carolina. Duke University Press. 2014. isbn 9780822356493 / 56615 When we lose a great love, our first impulse is to find a way through the grief—and the rage within the grief. When the loss is sudden, and perhaps especially when it wears the terrible clothing of “if only,” the grieving may take unexpected turns. All such loss, however it may strike, is traumatic. And, depending on the need, circumstance, and creativity of the person who has suffered the loss, it might emerge as art that can be shared with others. On October 11, 1981, at the beginning of what was to have been several months of joint fieldwork in a remote region of the Philippines, Renato Rosaldo’s wife and companion anthropologist, Michelle (Shelly) Rosaldo, fell from a precarious trail to her death. Suddenly, the woman he loved was gone, their two small children motherless, their immediate and long-range future dramatically reorganized . It would be twenty-eight years before these poems emerged. The book combines a timeline, two essays, photographs that bring the reader to the otherness of place (including a number of marvelous portraits), rough hand-drawn maps that attempt to trace the moment of disaster, important notes, an index, and, quite centrally, the poems. Many of these are written as imaginaries from the perspectives of his children (five years and fourteen months old when their mother died), a kind companion , an opportunistic “helper,” the forensic official, a field mouse, and the cliff itself. This is genre-bending in the most meaningful sense of the November–December 2014 • 69 reviews term, not because the author wanted to...