The Lost Pilot

About this book

"The Lost Pilot" is a poem about bereavement and the many improvisations that the heart performs as it seeks a way to hope and to live again after a shattering loss. The poet confronts a literal and figurative void as he mourns the disappearance of a father he never knew. Denied by the unique and violent circumstances of his pilot-fathers wartime death (1944 was the most terrible year of World War II) the consolations of a conventional funeral ritual he is also denied the consolations of fond memory as he has virtually no memories of his father at all. Without memories the poet is forced to the abstract extreme of grief an extreme at which his actions become the most vivid imaginable representations of the uncertainties and anxieties of human grief.