Reading the Poems of Someone Who Has Died

My friend died in February, which is the right month for the kind of death that comes slowly and then all at once. She was forty-eight. She had been a poet of the serious, uncommercialized kind — the kind who publishes slim collections with small presses and considers this a full life, which it is.

She had given me her last manuscript some weeks before she died, a printout in a binder clip, asking for notes. I took it home. I did not read it immediately, because I was not ready, and because she had not given it to me expecting urgency. Then she died, and I still had not read it, and the manuscript sat on my desk acquiring a weight I cannot quantify.

I read it eventually, two months after the funeral. I read it in the way you read the work of someone you loved — differently from anyone else's, because the voice on the page is a voice you know, and the things the voice says are things you recognise as having been said to you, or almost said, or thought in your direction.

There are poems about things she and I talked about. There is one about a walk we took together, though my name does not appear. There is a poem about what it is like to revise something you wrote when you were young and find the young self knew something the older self had forgotten. I have read this poem many times. I understand something different each time, which suggests she is still teaching me, at a remove.

I don't know what to do with the manuscript. I am not the executor of her estate. I have a copy given to me for a purpose I did not fulfil in time, and the question of what to do with it is one I have been sitting with for months.

What I know is this: the poems are very good. The last twenty, written in her final year, have a quality of earned simplicity — the clarity that comes from a long acquaintance with complexity, when the writer has finally dispensed with everything that is not necessary. She was doing her best work at the end.

This is why I am writing this. To tell someone she was doing her best work. To say: she was forty-eight, she left a manuscript and the poems are very good, and someone should read them.