When Grief Keeps Company: Poetic Language and Mourning the Mother in Sarah Maguires’ ‘The Invisible Mender’ and Lucie Brock-Broido’s ‘Soul Keeping Company’

This paper explores the ways in which poetic language might enact and facilitate the fundamental human experience of mourning, where mourning is understood theoretically to encompass the subject's always bi-directional relationship to loss. This concept of mourning as a process involving a concomitant acknowledgement of absence and an ongoing introjection of the lost object, is here considered through the particular focus of two poems which deal with the loss of the mother. The rupture of this dyadic relationship of mother and daughter is read as emblematic of the primary tearing upon which subjectivity is predicated. Through a focused literary critical analysis, involving both close reading of poems and a theorisation of the nature of a broader poetic language, and informed by a psychoanalytic framework, this paper describes mourning as a form of poesis and the poem itself as an ethical process by which to grapple with the rich interplay of loss and possibility, speech and silence.