Coming to Age: Growing Older with Poetry

In her poem Reconsideration, Mary Ann Hoberman reminds us, "...only lucky folk grow old."

When I was a young woman older people would tell me, "Don't ever grow old, Nancy." I would laugh and reply, "It's better than the alternative."

Now I am an older person, I still think old age better than the alternative. Still, every year brings a new reminder of what I am loosing. For the first time I feel a chill at the idea of nothingness. How can I not be? How can the world be if I am not?

This mystery begins to niggle at me when I wake at night. 

Coming to Age is a collection of poetry that speaks to the universal human experience of aging and the concerns and joys that accompany growing older. The poems were chosen for their universality and accessibility.

Themes include being rooted in this time and place; the passage of time; the solace of nature; the physical body's frailty; the loss of loved ones; the view from old age; the memories that made us who we are; the mystery of life; and that which gives solace and joy and sustains us.

Many of the poems moved me, eliciting a cold chill of recognition or a warm sun of memory.

"But memories, where can you take them to? Take one last look at them. They end with you," wrote Clive James in Star System. And I wonder about all the knowledge I hold that will be lost, the swing of my mother's blonde ponytail ascending the stairs when I was three, the sound of my son's baby voice. And I regret all the untold tales held secret in my mother's breast, the stories lost with death.

The breadth of the poems can be shown in these examples, Wendell Berry appreciating the peace nature brings and Kurt Vonnegut how we destroy the Earth.

The Peace of Wild Things

When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.
Wendell Berry

Requiem

The crucified planet Earth,
should it find a voice
and a sense of irony,
might now well say
of our abuse of it,
"Forgive them, Father,
they know not what they do."

The irony would be
that we know what
we are doing.

When the last living thing
has died on account of us,
how poetical it would be
if Earth could say,
in a voice floating up
perhaps
from the floor
of the Grand Canyon,
"It is done."
People did not like it here.
Kurt Vonnegut

It takes a kind of courage to read these poems, to open yourself to grapple with life and death. But you will find catharsis and a recognition that you are not alone, and you will perhaps even find joy.

There is "So much to do still, all of it praise," Derek Walcott wrote in Untitled #51.,"...how pure a thing is joy."

"What love, what longing, my reader, speaks to you from this page!" proclaims John Hall Wheelock in To You, Perhaps Yet Unborn, in which he imagines readers who read his words posthumously.

These poems are the gifts of poets whose words reach out over years or centuries to alter our perceptions and comfort us.

I was given a free ebook by the publisher through NetGalley. My review is fair and unbiased.

Coming to Age: Growing Older with Poetry
by Mary Ann Hoberman and Carolyn Hopley
Little, Brown and Company
Pub Date April 14, 2020
ISBN: 9780316424912
$25.00 (USD) hardcover; $12.99 ebook

from the publisher:

This exquisitely giftable anthology of poems about age and aging reveals the wisdom of trailblazing writers who found power and growth later in life. 

At eighty-two, the novelist Penelope Lively wrote: "Our experience is one unknown to most of humanity, over time. We are the pioneers." Coming to Age is a collection of dispatches from the great poet-pioneers who have been fortunate enough to live into their later years. 

Those later years can be many things: a time of harvesting, of gathering together the various strands of the past and weaving them into a rich fabric. They can also be a new beginning, an exploration of the unknown. We speak of "growing old." And indeed, as we too often forget, aging is growing, growing into a new stage of life, one that can be a fulfillment of all that has come before. 

To everything there is a season. Poetry speaks to them all. Just as we read newspapers for news of the world, we read poetry for news of ourselves. Poets, particularly those who have lived and written into old age, have much to tell us. Bringing together a range of voices both present and past, from Emily Dickinson and W. H. Auden to Louise Gluck and Li-Young Lee, Coming to Age reveals new truths, offers spiritual sustenance, and reminds us of what we already know but may have forgotten, illuminating the profound beauty and significance of commonplace moments that become more precious and radiant as we grow older.