Prageeta Sharma, Onement Won

 

Secular Ornament

Throughout this fallen fall into a diminished winter

with its ten thousand upturned leaves,
its impervious starlight for which I was given sight to look up, Upa,
having perceived the mind,
in an imperceptible 

snowed-in shadow. A demarcated yellow.

I was giving a future to breathe in. 

I am still discussing what traumas won’t shake.

Could they lessen in time? 

Why do you think I am with him because he is at peace with himself
and brings his peace to me. 

There is incalculable value in the quiet night of nonviolent affairs.

The latest poetry title by American poet Prageeta Sharma, her sixth, is Onement Won (Seattle WA/New York NY: Wave Books, 2025), a follow-up to her devastating Grief Sequence (Seattle WA/New York NY: Wave Books, 2019) [see my review of such here], a collection that wrote on and reacted to the loss of her husband due to cancer. As she wrote: “These are the facts: I lost my husband, composer and artist Dale Edwin Sherrard, on January 14, 2015, after his fight with esophageal cancer. // This is the fact and narrative, my obituary of his dying days, his death days.” This new collection is dedicated to her mother, and to her second husband, the photographer Michael Stussy, both of whom passed in 2023. As the press release for Onement One offers: “Having been twice widowed to cancer, Sharma questions the various relationships—familial, social, romantic, religious—that have shaped her identity.” How does one continue across such a length of grief? Or, as the poem “Metaphorically Challenged” begins: “I meant well and resisted comparisons / for a while because those who might cajole / me into finding their inaccuracy accurate / need likenesses. I was meant to find myself inside a metaphor / but I wasn’t there and felt disillusioned.”

“This is about coming back to oneself. // No Ram Dass. No Be Here Now. // No Om of sitting in place.” she writes, early in Onement One. “This is about size and succumbing.” Across such long and languid sentences that extend the page in sequence, and poems that extend across distances and into each other, Sharma writes through and around grief, and what might follow; what might emerge from such a heft of death and loss and ash. Sharma composes lyric meditations on grief and beyond grief, writing lost friendships and navigating such strange, foreign and familiar territories. “I want to feel more sentient,” she writes, as part of the poem “Sunday, Sunday,” “I say to the blankets and to the neurological / labor I hope to integrate. // I don’t want the ingestible lyric of my body to blindfold me. / I do wonder what David Lynch has learned from the Upanishads.” Given the extensive lyric explorations of her stunning prior collection, as well, how does one follow grief with grief? Or, as the poem “Long-Term Intimacy and Terminal Illness” ends:

Your body is working so hard to endure these days
and my body feels the sad ache of new melancholia 

for what is coming, for what is being taken away by fate,
and what of our hearts that become capacities of secular possession.

 

Prageeta Sharma, Grief Sequence

A HUMAN WITH FEELINGS

I am having trouble today. How gauche it is to be in this body being unseen by you now. And I am wearing to bed the floral shirt I bought you, because it’s the only thing that keeps me intact. You are not you anymore and I’m trying to understand how a human with feelings disappeared. You were mine. You were floral. You were more than a presence felt. But I fight to find you among the loudest, drunkest voices laughing at me when I go to their bars. Where are you? You held me in so many of them.

American poet Prageeta Sharma’s fifth full-length poetry title, the first of hers I’ve seen, is the powerful and heartfelt Grief Sequence (Seattle WA/New York NY: Wave Books, 2019). Following her poetry collections Bliss to Fill (Subpress Collective, 2000), The Opening Question (Fence Books, 2004, winner of the 2004 Fence Modern Poets Prize), Infamous Landscapes (Fence Books, 2007) and Undergloom (Fence, 2013), Grief Sequence is very much composed as a grief diary, set as a sequence of prose poems begun after the death of her husband, as she writes in her afterword, “THE MOON HAS SET: POETRY OBITUARY”:

I am exploring my attachment during this grieving process.

So I am now out a full year and am still very much in a complicated but life-changing grieving process, exploring the notions of narrative and attachment.

These are the facts: I lost my husband, composer and artist Dale Edwin Sherrard, on January 14, 2015, after his fight with esophageal cancer.

This is the fact and narrative, my obituary of his dying days, his death days.

“After Dale’s sudden cancer,” she writes, to open the poem “GLACIER NATIONAL PARK & THE ELEGY,” “his body wasting swiftly / to death. / I didn’t believe in love or beauty,                    or my / ability to write poems. / And my grieving turned into a sequence of / writing / hostile little elegies / in solitary sittings.” Sharma writes out a kind of photo album, presumably composed as they occur, leaving their sequence in an order prescribed to memory over any narrative order. In many ways, this collection is reminiscent of the “I remember” vein of books such as George Bowering’s similar exploration on grief after the death of his friend, the painter Greg Curnoe, in The Moustache: Memories of Greg Curnoe (Toronto ON: Coach House Press, 1993), as well as earlier, more well-known, works by Joe Brainard and Georges Perec (both of which were titled I Remember). Sharma composes her collection as stand-alone prose poems set one against another against another; poems that can’t help but react to each other, even if they work out of any particular sequence, existing just as much as a single, narrative thread. One step and then another, but not one necessarily begun with the idea of publication, instead focusing on writing her way through, and potentially out the other side, of grief. In an interview conducted by Thora Siemsen and posted at The Creative Independent on December 15, 2017, Sharma responds:

I think that in the past I was trying to look at what in literary tradition allowed me to feel liberated or free. But in the last three years I’ve just been working through ideas of grieving. I am writing through ideas of grief and trauma and exploring how the obvious cliché that life is for the living has really been depressing and yet important. Poetry has allowed me to go deeper into thinking about what it means to grieve, and love, and to make difficult choices that are about will.

Poetry can will certain senses into my daily life. I’m trying to will ideas of my noble self. At any age we can experience a lot of death, but I think you start to lose your mentors and you start to lose your loved ones. That can happen to people at any age, but it’s just been a little shocking to me lately. I’ve just been examining what it means to have poetry document our ideas of ourselves and how that shifts. If you don’t work through documenting that moment, you may lose it. You lose something precious about a self that you understand in a moment.

Non-writers would say things to me, particularly in support groups with widows and other grievers, like, “When you’re raw, you can only be around people who understand your rawness around trauma.” I didn’t understand that. I didn’t understand that there are expiration dates around what people can tolerate, about what you are doing or what you are going through. Poetry seems to be a mediated space where people accept the content. It’s a fair place for the content that is both raw or explored. Whereas in your quotidian life you have to prove you’re at certain stages of wellness. The poem is a timeless place where you can go into the spaces that you may not be able to socially or emotionally.

What becomes clear through these poems is not just an exploration of grief, loss and marriage, but an articulation of flailing, and a desperate attempt to find ground and balance through such an intimate upheaval, one that feels all-encompassing through the process of it, and for some time after. Hers is an array of heart-wrenching detail and meditation among the more mundane facts around death, dying and grief, all of which is mixed together with remarkable effect. “I remember distinct feelings of being the marginalized spouse,” she writes, in “MY POEM ABOUT FALSE FRIENDS,” “with two selves seen from the corner of an eye by the likes of you. I was the one that was seen, and also the one who felt a loose grip with that appearance. Your two bro-friends did see me as much less because I was a misshapen bag of stress and feeling the burden of racialized markings.”