Poetry About Grief and Loss - What Has Stayed With You

[Taker00]

David Hockney's death this week has had a lot of people thinking about what art means after the artist is gone, how a painting outlasts the person who made it, what it means to have a body of work that persists. It is the kind of loss that prompts reading, or returning to things you had not thought about in a while.

This is a thread for poetry about grief, loss or mortality that has genuinely stayed with you. Not necessarily the most famous or the most canonical, just the work that meant something at a particular moment or that you return to. Could be about the loss of a person, a time, a place, a version of yourself.

Share whatever feels right. No need to explain unless you want to.

[Oscar_38]

Mary Oliver's When Death Comes. Not for the death itself but for the list of what you want to have done with your life before it arrives. I have read it at least once a year for twenty years

[Gareth_11]

Douglas Dunn's Elegies for his wife Lesley. The whole collection, not just the famous sections. The ordinary domestic details of grief, the way ordinary objects carry impossible weight. The most honest poetry about loss I have ever read

[Highland Dylan]

Seamus Heaney's Clearances, the sonnets he wrote after his mother died. Number three with the peeling potatoes. I cannot read it without thinking of my own mothers kitchen

[IronFist66]

Frank O'Hara's The Day Lady Died. The list of ordinary things he does before reading the news, then the news itself in the last lines without any formal preparation. It is everything grief actually feels like

[Rachel]

Tony Harrisons Long Distance, the poem about his father still calling his dead mother's number. The last image of Harrison himself doing the same thing. I grew up in Leeds and the plainness of the language felt like home

[TeddyWhelan]

Pablo Neruda's Tonight I Can Write. Loss does not have to be death. Sometimes it is just the end of something. That poem understands the particular grief of loving someone you are no longer with

[Highland Builder]

Elizabeth Bishop- One Art. The escalating inventory of losses, the instruction to master the art of losing things, the crack in the final stanza where the instruction breaks down. The structure is the meaning

[DeadChat]

Kathleen Jamie's The Overhaul, the whole collection. The way she holds grief and landscape and ecology together without sentimentality. Genuinely Scottish in a way that does not exclude non-Scottish readers