of Blood and Rivers: A Book Elegies

Meditations on grief and the propulsive power of nature to invite one to navigate the territory of loss. One of the poems written out of Michael Delp's experience with grief begins "At first a koan, "What to be done?" then a mantra, finally a prayer said into flowing water, because so many things bleed, each individual kind of pain like a fire coming in unseen from far off, then the searing begins" As heard in the sample, the eighty-four elegiac poems in this book navigate through and beyond loss, grief, love, and the joy of being present in the moment. Inspired by the movement of river water, these poems metabolize loss in the ways our bodies come to know that some questions have no answers. Taken together as one, this prose poem emerges as a meditation, a prayer where grief balances love and body balances spirit. Loss comes to us all. This book bears forth the wisdom of looking to the stars for solace, the deep quiet of connecting to the natural world, remaining grounded in our own living bodies.