Kintsugi

Why is it that the best parts of the best poems about mourning have little directly to do with the humanness of grief—with the dead or the bereaved—but eddy instead around objects, fixate on things? Take the yew trees that cycle through Tennyson’s In Memoriam, for example, which the poet randomly thwacks at to assure himself that he is something other than a tree. Or the literal object-quality of Anne Carson’s Nox, a box of a book, which winds up being as much about how paint bleeds through paper as it is about translating Catullus or remembering a dead brother the author barely knew. Or Susan Howe, who named her elegy for her husband That This, collapsing the distance and nearness of things: that snowstorm, this whistling kettle. This snowy, that whistling. Snow kettle.

The intermingling of substances and moments, here one minute, gone the next, is bound together in the title of Thomas Meyer’s Kintsugi, which takes its title from a Japanese word that describes the mending of shattered ceramics with a lacquer mixed with gold. In applications of this technique, the original form of the tea bowl or vase or plate is apparent, while the gold lines that lace it make it impossible to forget the precise pattern in which it broke. A former wholeness, a remembered and illumined rupture, and a new whole all coexist in the same quotidian object.

Toward the end of Kintsugi, Meyer, like Howe, wonders about the similarities between disparate things. “Is this that?” he asks. “Sameness troubles me. / Table. Chair. Whatever… Things come and they go.” Kintsugi departs from and returns to the way that one thing has of becoming another, when regarded from the perspective of imminent loss. (Meyer began writing these poems when his longtime companion, Jonathan Williams, was dying, and wrote through and after his death.) Not only tables and chairs but also weather and books return and feel broken, unsure of their natures. The wobbliness animating objects in Meyer’s poems leads the poet into simple cognitive mistakes: misplacing “the watering can for the cat,” or “any flux of shadow” for “him coming to find me.”

These slight instances of seeing, or sensing, one thing for another should be dizzying, but instead the slips and fumbles feel surprisingly like distillations: enough attention to attend, for a moment, to a...