Verbal Magazine

Next to Nothing

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This slim but powerful volume traces the poet’s grief over the death of his 4 year old daughter, Miriam, over a period of about 9 months.  The first poem, ‘At Bethlehem Nursery’, is dated only a few weeks before Miriam’s death and acts as a counterpoint to the rest of the book.

Many of the poems are dated, and in all of them (bar the first), loss and death make their presence felt. As landscapes change – from New Hampshire, to Northern Ireland to Croatia – grief’s presence colours all Agee’s observations. A music box in Sarajevo brings thoughts of ‘parents’ love, papier-mache puppets, evergreen boughs’. There is ‘old pain’ in ‘revisiting sites of joy’, in the poem ‘Sea Campion’. The title poem ‘Next to Nothing’ touches on the absolute futility inherent in the words of comfort that well-meaning friends and family attempt to offer at such times. Agee runs the emotional gamut here, in some poems the grief is a dull ache, a counterpoint to life in others the pain is so raw it is almost painful to read:

The Worst
of the worst
was when
I lifted each lid
and saw
the blue eyes
I loved
more than life
stilled
forever
on the splattered bed

However this is more than the mere journal of a grief-stricken parent. This is a meditation on loss, and an engagement with it, that crosses from observation to art.
The Russian Formalist critic, Victor Shklovsky suggested that the purpose of art was ‘dehabitualisation’ – a process whereby the artist (or poet in this case) allowed the reader to experience something known intellectually as if for the first time, viscerally - a process whereby the artist could make ‘stones more stoney’. There are myriad accounts of losing a child out there, which provoke sympathy within the reader and little else. What Agee has done here, with this collection of extraordinary power, is let the reader feel, in some small way what Miriam was, is, and always will be, to him. A fitting tribute.

Catherine McGrotty

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