“Of Legend and Landscape”: Carlene Gadapee reviews Grief’s Apostrophe by Steven Ratiner
Grief’s Apostrophe
Steven Ratiner
Beltway Editions, 2025
91 pp.
Have you ever read a book of poems that you’d wished you had written yourself? One that speaks to things you have experienced in such a way that it helped make your own mess more clear? Steven Ratiner’s Grief’s Apostrophe is such a book, especially for those of us who have witnessed the decline of parents, their illnesses, frailties, and their deaths. Ratiner’s collection gives us borrowed language for those times we don’t have our own.
As a reader and a poet myself, I feel a kinship with Ratiner, or at least with his speaker, through these beautiful and accessible poems. They take the reader by the hand in order to explore and explain the exigencies of being in the “sandwich generation,” dealing with our own concerns while being responsible in many ways for our parents’ wellbeing and the needs of our own growing families. Ratiner leads us through the wilderness of grief, using references to sacred text and imagery, mythology, and common experiences as vehicles to plumb the depths of a feeling Self.
Structurally, these poems are extremely well-crafted. Ratiner’s use of familiar texts and the poet-speaker’s awareness of Self help bridge any divides. I’m also really intrigued by his use of punctuation as a narrative element, using it intentionally instead of merely conventionally. These poems are beautiful enough in their own right, but as a collection, Grief’s Apostrophe weaves a safety net for the reader in so many ways.
In the first section of the collection, the poems immediately pull us into the difficulties of managing the physical and emotional stress of aging parents. In the poem titled “The Corner of Bellington Street and Sparta,” the poet calls upon images from ancient Greek mythos, and blends those things seamlessly with images of illness and defiance:
…and so I say goddamn
to the doctors and their blood-work oracles,
goddamn to the festering pancreas, goddamn
to the clamor of battle no longer needing
my strong arms, my courage.
And curse as well the wintery god Metastasis,
all the bloody spoils in His keep…
The next poem in the section is one that focuses on the speaker’s mother’s failing body, ”(the body I am heir to)” and he lists all the damage that the “blighted protein” is causing. The poem ends with a poignant statement, that “[t]o curse one’s own breath is neither/ brave nor fiercely honest. Love’s void/ and death’s are not analogous.”
The reader is also treated to a master class in sound in such pieces as “Gott im Himmel.” Alliteration and internal rhymes create the architecture of this small poem. We are drawn to the repeated g sounds: Gott, glottal, grandmother, green, gaze. There are also the rhymes such as “gaze-maze-eyes-days.” As a complete piece, this is a love poem to both a person and a treasured memory.
The poem “Learning the Business” is an insightful and somewhat stark acknowledgement of a father’s sacrifices made for his family. The speaker recounts the hard, dangerous work his father did in order to keep a laundry and dry-cleaning business going, providing for his family out of both love and duty. At the end of the poem, when it’s made clear that the father is dying, the speaker says, “These days, I read neither ledger nor prayer book--/ but remember this: you were two-hundred pounds that// Saturday morning; a little more than half that when,/ come January, the orderlies wheeled you back// from radiation on the steel gurney, laid you/ into your hospital bed limp as laundry.” This poem reminds me of Robert Hayden’s “Those Winter Sundays,” in that when we are young, we don’t always understand or appreciate the sacrifices made, and when we finally do, it’s a sobering experience.
Ratiner’s use of familiar anchors –sacred literature, myths, art—helps the reader, through his speaker, to confront the tragedies and horrors of the world as we live in it. He invokes a muse to guide both his and our understanding: what is our role? What is our response supposed to be? In the second section of the collection, we are greeted by a poem that is both poignant and clever, titled “Pietà, Punctuated.” Ratiner has spelled out the punctuation in this poem, and it serves as a means of slowing the reader down and focusing the experience on the “her” in the poem, a grieving mother holding the broken body of her son. It is a stark and painful moment: we know the subject matter of the poem (Mary and Jesus), but in this way, Ratiner has also made the experience a more universal one, one that honors grieving mothers in all places, at all times.
The next poem also alludes to a familiar religious trope, that of the burning bush and Moses in Exodus. The poem is titled “The Burning Bush,” and it is told from the point of view of a speaker –we assume, at least at first, Moses—but the situation and the tone become universal. In this way, the familiar story is also contemporary: “In my world, everything burns--/ faces, skies, grand cities, the reservoir/ of human memory—so how worked up/ need I become over one nettled scrub/ aflame….” The speaker is addressed directly by the voice, and we, the readers, are also called to witness, indirectly. What are we being charged to do? And are we worthy or capable?
A few pages later, and we again have a reference to a story from sacred text, the story of Isaac, in the poem titled “Filial.” It is clear that this Isaac is not the one from the Old Testament, but is being used as an archetype of a faithful and dutiful son: the speaker must carry on alone, and in the world of the poem, it is making a meal, one of “corn meal, lamb shank, ripe tomato/ black bread, and a knuckled clove of garlic.” The meal is both sacrificial and reminiscent of Passover foods in some ways. Don’t we all want the Angel of Death to pass by?
Other poems in the second section tackle more global concerns, such as “Drowned Syrian Toddler Washes Up On Turkish Resort Beach Near Bodrum.” The poem treats the tragedy with both compassion and fierce attention: “Did I just/ mishear the reporter’s question:/ Whose child isn’t this?” The poem on the facing page, “Soft Target,” confronts the grim situation of gun violence in schools. “In this new blood curriculum—/ and with alarm bells clanging--// first graders are schooled in last words, / the show-and-tell of open wounds…” tells the tale of what every schoolteacher in the United States is fearful of.
As a counterpoint to so much personal and universal tragedy and grief, there is also a lovely poem titled “A Traditional Austrian Christmas,” in which the speaker brings us right into the warmth of an intimate memory from childhood. There is the Advent calendar, the singing of Stille Nacht (which the child-self of the speaker “thought it meant/ Night Made Out of Steel”), the smells of cabbage boiling, pears… but then, too, a serious thought, one that recalls the Crucifixion: “It is finished… / Lacking a spear, will a steak knife do?” Even in a precious memory, there is also some sadness.
There are other intimate poems in this section as well. There is “She Loved,” which captures a relationship with passion recollected, and there is a poem about parenting, titled “All Hallows” that talks about what happens when the children have gone to bed and their candy haul is open to inspection by the parents: “All the treats/ doled out sparingly when we were young--/ there’s no one to stop us now. And yet/ we let each mouthful loll on the tongue, / to make the pleasure last.” But what lasts? The poem ends in melancholy when the speaker says, “A Chivas/ on the rocks and, masquerading as our parents, / we make love on the couch with the TV on--/… as if/ we still desired every bit of this life as much/ as we do the milk, the dark, the bittersweet.”
The third section of the collection has several poems that reference works of art and some others that really play with the use of punctuation. In this way, these poems seem more visual. In “Revising Paradise,” the focus must be on structural elements. Ratiner’s use of punctuation as a poetic element is intentional and focused. It joins other poems in the collection, like “Pieta, Punctuated,” “Daughter,” and two others that follow; “Poem Beginning with a Line from Bob Hicok” and the final poem of the collection, “Grief’s.” I am intrigued by these poems, mainly because punctuation is so often overlooked as a merely conventional, expected element of writing. Instead, Ratiner has reimagined and repurposed punctuation for both pacing and for the narrative of the poem. In “Revising Paradise,” the speaker refers to a common editor’s notation, saying, “Here, the tiny peaks of carets—each summit, / an aerie for some new seraphic voice.” And later, he says, “My longing feels italicized.” Employing punctuation in this way makes it both fun and serious; we are asked to consider the often overlooked marks that help us make sense of everything, at least on the page.
Returning to mythos-as-vehicle, the poem “Aeneas and Anchises” is a delicate blending of two anchor texts, The Iliad and The Aeneid, and present-day father-son concerns. In this way, the poet-speaker moves us from the archetypal to the individual by calling on familiar images to explore difficult emotions. This is a poem that reminds us that some works of literature are classics, and we really should read them. They give us a language and an emotional arc to follow when we are overwhelmed by our own experiences. The poem starts with imagery from the allusive text but moves immediately to a recognizable landscape: “I carried you, Father,/ on my back, along the rocky path/ from Troy to Ithaca, turning south to/ Flatbush and Queens.” This part is also a clever play on the geography of New York while hearkening back to the Troy and Ithaca of legend; the landscape is a familiar one, and it helps to give the reader a point of reference. And then we read, “Still, I went on carrying you, / into the citadels of academia, /… and across page upon page of heartsick stanzas”—this is the role of the poet. We use our “stuff”—sometimes, it’s the classics, sometimes memory, but always, the emotion is there, needing words and form. Ratiner does this exquisitely.
Other poems explore doubt, shaken faith, introspection, and a myriad of other deeply human emotions. One poem that really carries weight is “Oracle,” in which the speaker is pondering the sharing of the Eucharist as juxtaposed with the harshness of the world around him, a “sudden eruption car door/ or gunshot echoing through stone porticos as/ all the black wings scatter across parched fields but my mouth remains shut tight/ barely breathing waiting for a sign for some/ undeserved assurance even as I deny the very/ possibility do this in remembrance of me”—this poem is all one sentence, and it happens in a rush, with no end punctuation. Doubt does not end easily, not even in the presence of tradition and faith.
Other poems of note include “The Arborist,” which reminds us of Seamus Heaney’s poem, “Digging.” (The poem is dedicated to Heaney as well.) The speaker says, “I am more relieved/ / by the gravelly syllables tumbled smooth/ in the fluency of your voice—the familiar// and the forgotten of your poetry unearthed.” It’s beautiful, especially the last two lines:
your father’s fathers bent to their work,
writing verse with the tips of their spades.
I also really like the poem “A Story about the Moth,” which captures the importance of the unseen or minor characters in familiar stories. In this poem, the speaker recounts what happens to a moth who “took three mouthfuls from/ the linen shroud of poor Lazarus” and then, when the tomb was opened and Lazarus emerged, healed, the moth “had become something more/ than himself: the psalm of larval yearning, the patriarch// of clay-colored wings whose lineage is among us still”—how ennobling! In this way, we can both smile and contemplate the effect of a miracle on the marginalized, disregarded, bit-players in the history of the world.
The final poem of the collection is titled “Grief’s,” and it answers the questions we may have accrued throughout the text: what is an apostrophe? An apostrophe, in this collection, is meant to be both a nod to the conventional use of possessive punctuation and to the poetic device that refers to when the speaker addresses someone not present, and in this case, who has died. The word apostrophe comes from the Greek word apostrephein, which translates to “to turn away.” These poems, however, do not turn away from grief and pain, but instead, help us confront our own. In this final poem, Ratiner tells us that an apostrophe is “that placeholder for pure absence.” It’s a place where we can “return to the day that’s/ always been waiting” and we can move forward with both our memories and a sense of completion, maybe feel forgiveness for our own perceived failings, and find peace.
Poet and teacher Carlene M. Gadapee lives in northern New Hampshire with her husband, several fruit trees, and a beehive. She holds two Masters’ Degrees (MEd and MA-LS). She can be found on Facebook as Carlene M Gadapee, on Instagram at @carlenegadapee, and on BlueSky at @carlenemgadapee. Carlene M. Gadapee’s chapbook, What to Keep (Finishing Line Press, 2025), joins her poems and book reviews in many journals including Allium, Smoky Quartz, Touchstone, Gyroscope Review, Vox Populi, and MicroLit.