Some Thing Black

By Jacques Roubaud

Book Overview

In 1983 Jacques Roubaud s wife Alix Cleo died at the age of 31 of a pulmonary embolism. The grief-stricken author responded with one brief poem ( Nothing ), then fell silent for thirty months. In subsequent years, Roubaud poet, novelist, mathematician composed a series of prose poems, a collection that is a profound mediation on the experience of death, the devastation it brings to the lover who goes on living, and the love that remains. Despite the universality of this experience, no other writer has so devoted himself to exploring and recording the many-edged forms of grief, mourning, bewilderment, emptiness, and loneliness that attend death. No other writer has provided a kind of solace while facing with honesty and hardness the intricate ways in which the living are affected by such a loss. Some Thing Black is an ongoing monologue from Roubaud to his wife, as death assaults the mind s failure to comprehend absence. Roubaud both refuses to and cannot surrender his wife to the past ( I always wake up in your voice, your hand, your smell ). The death, having occurred in an instant of time, goes on in him ( But inside me your death proceeds slowly, incomprehensibly ). While acknowledging death calls for a poetry of meditation, Roubaud is enraged at the limitations of language and words to affect the biological reality. Rather, all that language can do is clarify the exactness of his grief and to recall precisely the image of her life and death. But such recollection the sight of her dead body, her photographs, her things, the rooms they lived in becomes a memory infinitely torturous. And his most anguished recollection is of their making love ( These memories are the darkest of all ), and a sense of guilt for somehow not having prevented her death ( I did not save you from that difficult night ). This is a brave and honest book that does not disguise that pain of loss. Its nobility, grace, and humanity rest in its refusal to falsify death s harsh presence ( This dirty rotten life to be mixed up with death ) and in its acceptance of the mind s limitations ( I do not understand ). This moving, compassionate, uncompromising book is one of the most significant works of our time. Included in this edition is a portfolio of photographs made by Roubaud s wife in 1980 entitled If Some Thing Black. "

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0916583481
• ISBN13: 9780916583484
• Release Date: January 1990
• Publisher: Dalkey Archive Press
• Length: 144 Pages
• Weight: 0.90 lbs.
• Dimensions: 8.9" x 0.7" x 5.8"

Customer Reviews

"This morning it's unthinkable to go out into the sun"

In the collection, the poet, Roubauld paints a view of grief, reflecting and being haunted by the death of his wife, Alec Cleo, who died at the young age of 31. Some of these poems are quite raw but they transcend being simply confession by the sheer artistry. Much experimental poetry tends to be cold or dry; here we have someone experimenting with meaning and words because of the difficulty of words to hold grief, to express loss, to give oneself a will to live. Knowing that words can't quite accomplish these tasks gives the poems a haunted feeling, as if they were reminders of what can only be lived. There is a great diversity of techniques and approaches in this book, including a lot of halts and silences that move in unexpected directions and surprising phrases. The title phrase occurs multiple times throughout the collection, like an echoing voice, one such instance: "Some thing black which closes in locks shut pure, unaccomplished" The book also includes a collection of photographs by his wife, Alex Cleo, called some thing black and they clearly influenced some of what he wrote. "I can not write about you with more truth then you have done" I recommend this book wholeheartedly; one of the unique qualities it contains is its persistence in grief and its concrete emotionality: "The phone will ring. The voice which the man who is alone because of a death will hear is not that of the woman he loves. It's some other voice, any voice. He will hear it. This does not prove he is alive."