"in coming to terms with the newly dead, I seem to have agitated the spirits of the long dead. They were stirring uneasily in their graves, demanding to be mourned as I had not mourned them when they were buried. I was plunged into retroactive grief for my father, and could no longer deny, though I still tried, the loss I'd suffered at the death of my mother. ... Was it possible ... that one could mourn over losses that had occurred more than half a century earlier?"

You may also like:

• 

  Delmore Schwartz
  Poet

• 

  Gregory Orr
  Poet

• 

  Jamake Highwater
  Writer

• 

  James Atlas
  Publisher

• 

  John Berryman
  Poet