In the Unwalled City

In the Unwalled City takes its title from Epicurus, who wrote: “Against other things it is possible to obtain security, but when it comes to death, we human beings all live in an unwalled city.” This affecting book—which weaves prose memoir with poetry—explores that feeling of being open to attack—in this case the pain of grief after Robert Cording’s thirty-one-year-old son Daniel died.

 

To borrow a phrase from C.S. Lewis, here is “a grief observed,” encompassing not only the big questions but also the impact of grief on daily life. For a poet like Cording, one form that grief takes is that of speaking to his son. In “Afterlife,” Cording has a vision of his son replying: “let the emptiness remain empty . . . Stop writing down / everything you think I’m telling you. / This is your afterlife, not mine.”

 

At the heart of In the Unwalled City is a series of questions: How does loss change a person? How does one chart a new life that both acknowledges a son’s death and still finds a way back to delight? How does one now live fully in the unwalled city? 

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In the Unwalled City

In the Unwalled City takes its title from Epicurus, who wrote: “Against other things it is possible to obtain security, but when it comes to death, we human beings all live in an unwalled city.” This affecting book—which weaves prose memoir with poetry—explores that feeling of being open to attack—in this case the pain of grief after Robert Cording’s thirty-one-year-old son Daniel died.

 

To borrow a phrase from C.S. Lewis, here is “a grief observed,” encompassing not only the big questions but also the impact of grief on daily life. For a poet like Cording, one form that grief takes is that of speaking to his son. In “Afterlife,” Cording has a vision of his son replying: “let the emptiness remain empty . . . Stop writing down / everything you think I’m telling you. / This is your afterlife, not mine.”

 

At the heart of In the Unwalled City is a series of questions: How does loss change a person? How does one chart a new life that both acknowledges a son’s death and still finds a way back to delight? How does one now live fully in the unwalled city? 

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In the Unwalled City

In the Unwalled City

by Robert Cording
In the Unwalled City

In the Unwalled City

by Robert Cording

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Overview

In the Unwalled City takes its title from Epicurus, who wrote: “Against other things it is possible to obtain security, but when it comes to death, we human beings all live in an unwalled city.” This affecting book—which weaves prose memoir with poetry—explores that feeling of being open to attack—in this case the pain of grief after Robert Cording’s thirty-one-year-old son Daniel died.

 

To borrow a phrase from C.S. Lewis, here is “a grief observed,” encompassing not only the big questions but also the impact of grief on daily life. For a poet like Cording, one form that grief takes is that of speaking to his son. In “Afterlife,” Cording has a vision of his son replying: “let the emptiness remain empty . . . Stop writing down / everything you think I’m telling you. / This is your afterlife, not mine.”

 

At the heart of In the Unwalled City is a series of questions: How does loss change a person? How does one chart a new life that both acknowledges a son’s death and still finds a way back to delight? How does one now live fully in the unwalled city? 


Product Details

ISBN-13: 9781639821167
Publisher: Slant Books
Publication date: 09/01/2022
Sold by: Barnes & Noble
Format: eBook
Pages: 118
File size: 1 MB

About the Author

Robert Cording taught English and creative writing at College of the Holy Cross for thirty-eight years and then worked as a poetry mentor in the Seattle Pacific University MFA program. He has published nine collections of poems, the latest of which is Without My Asking, and a volume of prose on poetry and religion, Finding the World’s Fullness. He has been awarded two NEA fellowships in poetry, a Pushcart Prize, and has had work in numerous anthologies, including Poets of the New Century, The Best American Spiritual Writing, The Poetry Anthology, and The Best American Poetry.


Robert Cording taught English and creative writing at College of the Holy Cross for thirty-eight years and then worked as a poetry mentor in the Seattle Pacific University MFA program. He has published nine collections of poems, the latest of which is Without My Asking, and a volume of prose on poetry and religion, Finding the World’s Fullness. He has been awarded two NEA fellowships in poetry, a Pushcart Prize, and has had work in numerous anthologies, including Poets of the New Century, The Best American Spiritual Writing, The Poetry Anthology, and The Best American Poetry.

Read an Excerpt

LAMENTATIONS (1)

 

 

I.

 

Grief is the art

(can it ever be called that?)

of starting over. Every morning

the same morning.

 

Every evening the same.

The light tipping above

the horizon, dipping below.

 

A day. Another day

of second thoughts. Another night

of if only, what if, what else

could we have done?

 

 

II.

 

Days, weeks, months, years,

all unpunctuated,

an endless run-on sentence

devoid of verbs, actions, time

 

and without any of

those little logic words—

although, just as, similarly, but—

that connect one thought to another,

 

grief’s preference the childlike

and then, and then, and then,

as in my six-year-old son’s journal

in which every day, every event

 

that summer in New Hampshire

had exactly the same worth

and felt to him like one

endlessly repeating summer day

 

which he loved, but which now,

as I read through it,

as if involuntarily,

day-by-day-by-day coldly numb.

 

 

III.

 

If language is fossil poetry,

as Emerson believed,

each word shuddering to life

in the instant it spoke

 

reality to its speaker,

the word I bore into being

(if only because I’d never fully

experienced it) was heartsore,

 

from the Old English,

heortsarnes—meaning “grief,”

meaning exactly what

it sounds like it means,

 

a soreness which is

not a metaphor for some ache

that can be cured

or will go away in time,

 

but a soreness always present,

the what is now

and now will always be

that returns you, involuntarily

 

or by choice, to the what is not.

A word that is almost a sentence

in itself, waiting for each

of us to complete it:

 

he is heartsore, she is heartsore,

I am heartsore.

Heortsarnes—that deep bruise

of sound born into word.

Table of Contents

Contents

 

 

In the Unwalled City (1)

 

 

I

 

Lamentations (1)

Walking

A Pair of Roseate Spoonbills

Afterlife

Not a Wish

At the Cemetery

Locket

 

In the Unwalled City (2)

 

 

II

 

Lamentations (2)

Icarus

Lost

Bobcat

Another State

Koi Pond: Failed Meditation

 

In the Unwalled City (3)

 

 

III

 

Lamentations (3)

Torment and Love

Swallowtail Kites

Melancholy’s Mirror

Aubade

Doves in Fog

Sketchbook: Naples, Florida

 

In the Unwalled City (4)

 

 

IV

 

November Deer

Father’s Day

August

St. Francis and the Birdfeeders

Next

Coffin Photos

An Answer Without a Question

Early Spring

Screensaver

Quasset and Sprucedale

The Words We Speak

 

In the Unwalled City (5)

 

Acknowledgments

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