Such Sweet Sorrow: Poems at 90
Lawrence E. Hussman
Alabama: North Meridian Books, 2024
Hussman, who only turned to writing poetry in his 80s, has published two chapbooks, Last Things (2020) and Pre-Posthumous Poems (2021). New poems have continued to come to him, and his growing body of poetic work has achieved a new unity. That unity is embodied here, in Such Sweet Sorrow, for which Hussman has revised and reorganized many of the chapbook poems and joined them with his new ones. This collection is Hussman’s passionate meditation on the animal life of the Oregon coast and what it reveals, at least for one poet, about the human animal and its place in the world.
“This collection invites you to look at nature and at the nature of things and relationships through the eyes of an unsentimental realist with the soul of a poet, an atheist who aches for spiritual redemption and meaning, a loner who longs for companionship. Guided by the poet, you look, unflinchingly, at accidents, at death, and you get up close and personal with a squirrel and a salmon.” -Wendy Winn, Afterword