One of the poets featured in the upcoming issue of 32 Poems  is Bruce Bond, whose 2008 Blind Rain (LSU Press) explores the tragi-magical facts of memory and departure. In our age that valorizes emotional hardiness, it is often only under the influence of good writing about loss that readers explore the fullness of their own griefs. That is the experience I had of the beautiful, careful, and surprising poems in this book. Remembering my grandmother in each touch of the poet’s hand to his subjects, I found the way I wanted to touch my memories of her.

The losses in this book are several, including a group of poems in memory of musicians. Several others recall the poet’s parents, to whom the book is dedicated. Bond, a classical and jazz musician himself, gives us a mother whose hands wear music as gloves and whose body becomes a radio. The father he paints is both the young warrior in Europe fighting for the flag and the dying man whom a petrified son finds already unreachable. The extent to which those we love give form and meaning to the universe we inhabit is trenchantly and compellingly explored in each of these poems. The poet’s voice, sometimes singular, sometimes plural, is placed and displaced in the universe by the departure of these important figures. Bond writes, “I eat, sleep, move about, / forever losing my place in the sky,” dramatizing a displacement of the self that seems also to upset the structure of the universe. That the world can seem meaningless when those who crafted that meaning depart it, forces the voice back into a one-sided dialogue, talking to the man in the hospital bed and all those already gone. Another poem ends, “as if the silence / of things were their readiness, their ears,” and we can feel, and finally understand, that the silence of the loved one amputates the self’s comprehension of the world.

Read this book for the beauty of its rhetorical observations, the surprising turns of its language and images, or if you’re having a hard time, have ever had a hard time, and want proof that it is universal, and can be beautiful.

—Jasmine V. Bailey