Winner of the Blue Light Press Book Award 2020.
Poems about loss of self, loss of loved ones, loss of others who lost their lives through war and disaster.
We belong to each other “even in the worst day,” Helga Kidder writes in her fourth collection of poems, Loving the Dead. That belonging encompasses the arcing heavens, the “bruised moon,” the trilling Earth, the sometimes prideful tug of our closest relations. Growing up in Germany’s Black Forest, Kidder brings “luck in [my] luggage” to a new continent, with new eyes and hopes, to remind us, “You must turn on your own light.” And she does, honoring both her sister’s life and packing us for the luminous journey into memory’s beam and vapor.
Praise for Loving the Dead:
We belong to each other “even in the worst day,” Helga Kidder writes in her fourth collection of poems, Loving the Dead. That belonging encompasses the arcing heavens, the “bruised moon,” the trilling Earth, the sometimes prideful tug of our closest relations. Growing up in Germany’s Black Forest, Kidder brings “luck in [my] luggage” to a new continent, with new eyes and hopes, to remind us, “You must turn on your own light.” And she does, honoring both her sister’s life and packing us for the luminous journey into memory’s beam and vapor.
— Linda Parsons, author of Candescent and This Shaky Earth
In this haunting collection, poems serve as “steps to the past,” building a road where dreams lead to memory and questions to prayer. They curve between sadness and regret, while sorrow hovers nearby. Kidder does not try to shield us from her mourning: Instead, she weaves a way through it with the only thing left to the living — language. She leads us into the natural world of trees, birds, flowers, rivers, the “gaps and rills /where language roils” and encourages us to feel, to “release our tongues’ arrows/as earth unfolds her words. If there is “a limit to carrying absence,” Kidder takes us to the very edge and asks us to follow.
— Sandy Coomer, author of Available Light
In language infused with the perfume of gardens and color, Loving the Dead weaves poems of loss, absence, and ageing into one bright epiphany that the dark vessels of our minds / taste the light of stars (“The Departed”). In this fourth collection, Helga Kidder explores the notion that we walk in our own fires, / forget about the burn afterwards (“Waiting all Summer”) and that though we continue to question the decisions we have made, [m]emory stumbles over the past, / cannot re-shape it (“May the ground be like feathers to you“). With images that surge and flow through these pages, Kidder’s words linger long after the reader puts down the book. Though this collection deals with weighty issues, she wisely reminds us in “Barometer of Absence” that [t]here is a limit to carrying absence.
— KB Ballentine, author of The Light Tears Loose, and Almost Everything, Almost Nothing
Reviewing Helga Kidder’s Latest Collection of Poetry by Ray Zimmerman