In this passionate second book of poems, Eileen P. Kennedy explores the dynamic between partners as Alzheimer's disease progresses. Kennedy weaves the collection about the relationship in three sections: before, during and after the death.
In the first section, Kennedy positions her life and her lovers in the events happening concurrently in the decade they are together. She examines the early loving relationship, her lover's brilliance, and the beginning of the decline in both America and Latin America.
"Feel me with your hands until words are not needed...Touch my head softly till this long night is over." Or their happy lives traveling. "When I think of Oaxaca/I remember the Zocalo where they sold pipa del agua/ and chocolate dripping from paper cups." Kennedy pays tribute to the writers she loves 'Where the ghost of D.H. Lawrence /wrote in the park about Zapotec mornings. / Where you read him aloud to me there."
In the second section, Kennedy studies, with eloquence and skill, the deterioration and death of her partner, "Your flailing and shouting has stopped/ The accusations too/ I am at your side/ When you don't know me at all." Or "I wheel you to the solarium, / gurney with saline attached./ Time slows/ as I read to you One Hundred Years of Solitude." Her sense of loss as he fades "There are many places/ that feel you gone/ vacant coat pegs..."
In the last section, she chronicles her life in anguish and redemption after her lover's death. "On warm days, I remember the way we made love in the afternoon, your hair straggling/ out of its ponytail. I dreamt you were ninety, and sleeping beside me, your strong/
features still recognizable." She writes a cento from poets such as Emily Dickinson and T.S. Eliot about memory, to turn her sorrow over to the world and finishes with a year of grief and recovery at home and in Latin America.
An intense and uplifting collection, Kennedy acknowledges the difficulty of being close to someone with a rapidly failing mind in "Vespers," and "Six Months After." She describes the struggle with pharmaceuticals in "Medicated." and "Snow Village in a Bottle."
Kennedy imbues a strong sense of place in her poems from the two places she lives, from the Northeast United States, "The day of your cremation the seagulls swooped/down and ate the berries you planted by the saltbush. From Latin America "Here, early sunset settles/on searing afternoon./ January slides to soft orange, mourning the heat that goes."
Touch My Head Softly contains some award-winning poems. "Dream of my Lover" won Second Prize in the Penumbra Haik Poetry Contest. "Eulogy for the Costa Rican Ghosts," was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Poems from this collection were also published in Muse and Stone, Tribeca Poetry Review and Seven Hills Review. Kennedy's first book of poetry, Banshees (Flutter Press, 2015, ) was awarded Second Place for Poetry in the Wordwrite Book Awards and Honorable Mention from the New England, New York and London Book Festivals.
This powerful collection is dedicated to people living with Alzheimer's, their caretakers and families. Part of the proceeds for the sale of the book will go to the Alzheimer's Association.
About the Author :
Eileen P. Kennedy is a poet and academic who has focused on the writing process. Her former partner died of Alzheimer's Disease at the age of 69 and this collection is based on those experiences. Her first book, Banshees (Flutter Press, 2015) was nominated for a Pushcart Prize and awarded Second Prize from the Wordwrite Book Award in Poetry. She holds a doctorate in language and literacy and has published a textbook, as well as fiction and nonfiction. She lives in Western Massachusetts where she canoes, hikes, and writes. She winters in Costa Rica. More at EileenPKennedy.com
Review :
"A blaze of meaning in every strand." There is a blaze in every line of these poems. Eileen P. Kennedy's poems about the death of her partner to Early Onset Alzheimer's captivate us with their sheer will and force because they build and form lines of eloquent determinacies, saying everything that is hard to say with such deep, affective tonal conviction and craft. Her powerful verses endure: "I follow you to my wreck." The "wreck" is the emotional centers of these poems that never avert from the reality of this loss. The poems join the visage of past memories and present conditions, making each a poignant step of recovering the truth of grief.
-Prageeta Sharma, author of Grief Sequence (Wave Books, 2019)
In Touch My Head Softly, Eileen P. Kennedy has written an extraordinary book of poems about the death of a male lover taken in middle age with Alzheimer's Disease. On every page of this engrossing book, she draws the reader into a world marked by heterosexual passion, mutual admiration, a profound love of nature, and a deep commitment to beauty-in music, in art, in human relations. Remarkably, Kennedy steers absolutely free of any untoward emotionalism. Her portrayal of the depth of her sorrow, could not, I think, strike the reader as more genuine.
-Preston M. Browning, Jr., Associate Professor Emeritus of English, University of Illinois at Chicago; Director, Wellspring House Writers Retreat
Eileen P. Kennedy has created a timely elegy and song of praise for our threatened, beautiful Americas, both North and South, through the lens of the personal: lovers facing great loss during the devastating course of a ravaging illness. Her gaze is generous and unflinching, and her language concise, lyrical, haunting.
-Carol Edelstein, author of Past Repair (Simian Press, 2020)
When do you become a stranger to your lover? How could he have died suddenly without you there? Dementia changes a passionate relationship and evokes fear of aging and death along with the memories of pre-Alzheimer's precious times. Moving from finishing 'each other's sentences, ' to being unrecognized and accused of betrayal, these are heart-wrenching poems of mourning, passion, and homage. Eileen P. Kennedy spins a story of desire, outrage and coming to terms with the unthinkable.
-Cheryl J. Fish, author of Crater & Tower (Duck Lake Books, 2020)
