Requiem (Carnegie Mellon University Press Poetry Series) | Virginia Konchan

Poems that explore literary and religious depictions of grief to honor the loss of a mother.

Requiem is a collection anchored in personal and collective grief, remembrance, and commemoration, journeying through the loss of a mother in a series of elegies, fugues, and lamentations that draw from the Church’s canonical hours of prayer as collected in a breviary. Historical and religious mourning rites, and the grief work of John Donne, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Roland Barthes, Emily Dickinson, and Mozart, among others, establish a lyric dialogue around aesthetic representations of grief, invoking a doubleness between the griever and the grieved; a mutuality and interconnectedness that illuminate the role of witness in poetry, mortality, and transcendence. Requiem enacts our deepest longing: to honor and immortalize the beloved.