Reviewed by P. F. Anderson
Content Warning: pandemic trauma, medical trauma, financial trauma, Long COVID, chronic illness, chronic pain, caregiving
Reading the title, there is a sweetness to Days of Grace and Silence that perhaps misleads the reader as to the grit of the content. When I first read the words “grace” and “silence,” I anticipated a work that expounds on roots overtly tied to a missionary fervor of faith, with silence of a sort both meditative and serene, perhaps even idyllic. I approached reading the book, honestly, with a bit of trepidation, despite the strength of my own spiritual life, simply because I’ve grown weary of the banality of much contemporary spiritual poetry, and the phrase “grace and silence” holds little resonance for the ironies of my own disabled life. I first tried reading this book the way I read so many other poetry books—a kind of dowsing approach, opening the book at random, dabbling here and there, floating through the book to see what calls, what resonates. This proved to be a flawed approach, as were my original thoughts on what to anticipate. I should have known better.
The subtitle, A Chronicle of COVID’s Long Haul, proved a far better guide to how to read this book. My new approach was to work through these poems in the order they appear in the book, from page one through to the end, as if it was a diary or a history, in which the sequence and order are critically important to understanding the content. Let me tell you—they are. These are not poems to cherry pick, with juicy lines here and there; rather, the book is a collection of images and threads that are woven into a much stronger fabric than any of the threads could be alone. My revised reading approach yielded a vastly different experience of the content, with the collection telling a story in verse.
A disclaimer seems to be in order to contextualize my response to the book. Like the author, Ann E. Wallace, I am a person living with Long COVID. Like Ann, I acquired this distinction during the very earliest days of the pandemic, during March of 2020. Indeed, when reading the introduction, I realized that Ann and I have been in the same support groups, in the same Zoom rooms, at the same time. In those days, the Long COVID support world was a small one, and it should not have surprised me that we crossed paths, but still it did–and does. I’m not sure if this shared experience makes me a good reviewer for this poetry collection. I find myself unable to “answer” if these are good poems or not, because they touch me so viscerally I’m unable to examine them for shape, form, line, the punch of a choice image. Instead, reading them, I flash back, in a kind of PTSD, as if I’m watching Ann or my own self as a silent transparent spirit hovering over a shoulder. I’m probably too biased, or too near the content, in other words, to judge the book for its “quality” or “enduring value.” I can tell you that this collection resonates powerfully with me, and that in many ways it is an accurate representation of the experience of those days, at least for some–and for me. In that sense, any library collecting reflections on this pandemic should absolutely invest in a copy of this book.
In the book’s opening section, “Days of Pressure and Fog,” the poems are dated and sequential, like a diary. They roll past, reliving the early days, as if through blurs and gaps that reveal a vivid image, and then erase it again. Those early poems were the hardest for me to read, bringing back difficult lived experiences that may be true for many of us. Some examples include:
- “And as they baste and stitch mask after mask, / as spring turns to summer, America’s women brace” – from “The War Effort” (April 3, 2020)
- “But the morgues are full, / and the refrigerated trucks, / and the cemeteries…” – from “Math Problem” (April 7, 2020)
- “I fight to remember the story / of me.” – from “Days of Pressure and Fog” (April 15, 2020)
- “so that I no longer hear the sirens, / until I do.” – from “Spring Song” (April 20, 2020)
- “The president wondered aloud / if we might wipe out the pandemic / with disinfectant…” – from “Fool’s Gold” (April 23, 2020)
The first of these dated poems, “Quarantined Hours” (March 21, 2020), was written while I was also in the throes of acute COVID, and begins, “Hours bump, one into the other, / in these close and viral quarters,” and closes “the press / of pain / hard upon / my heart,” almost as if the words of the poem are themselves trickling through an hourglass’s pinched waist, mimicking how the world shrinks during illness to the few square feet occupied by our body, the vague awareness of a loved one in another room feeling as distant as the moon. I perceive layers and layers of possible interpretation in these few spare lines, these fifteen words, until my head spins with them.
because breath
is not something
anyone would dare
to hold right now,
even for luck.“The Taste of Fear” (April 17, 2020)
While not all of the book’s poems carry dates, many do. The section headers themselves tell a story in sequence, across the first few years of the pandemic. “Days of Pressure and Fog” leads to “This Dangerous Place.” “Sounds Will Carry” marks a year from the start, passes it, and continues into “The Infinity of Hope,” taking place yet another year on, and passing into yet another year. These section headers ground this story of Long COVID in the context of a person’s life being shaped, reshaped, and reshaped again by illnesses sudden and chronic. Then the story is hammered into the unsurprising warning of an illness that sinks its hooks into life after life of those she loves: “when first one daughter, / and then a second, / fell sick and sicker, / I should have been ready.” (from “Practice” [Spring, 2023]).
The words “virus” and “viral” stud the book like Morse code, drum beats, hoofbeats, repeating over and over, keeping rhythm in a space that has lost its own, or like the pain of a toothache one keeps prodding to see if it still hurts or to confirm that you are still real. A particularly ironic, perhaps masochistic humor, populates the poem “This Virus, a Villanelle” (June 8, 2020), the first villanelle I’ve ever encountered that uses the word “villanelle” itself as one of the repeating rhyming words of the form. A brave choice and one that works surprisingly well in the sinister tones of the poem. The next poem, “Fourteen Weeks” (June 15, 2020), delves into the burden of time-keeping that accompanies so many griefs and losses, including Long COVID. The poem describes counting days, then weeks, then months. Further on in the book, another poem is titled “One Year into the Long Tail of This Virus I Find Things I Do Not Recognize,” describing the wear and tear and change in the body, ending triumphantly–or perhaps in surprise–“each one a mark / proclaiming that I am still here.”
As I finish writing this review, it is my own day 1599. Tomorrow will be another well-rounded landmark. I found myself wondering if Ann still counts, like I do, then read more of the later poems, which may answer the unasked question of whether she’s recovered more than I have.
My next thought, upon waking—
do other people see medical bills,
one after the other, after the other,
inscribed within their eyes
while they sleep…“Water World” (Spring, 2023)
The clever bitterness of “What Luck” (Spring, 2022), “to say thank you / for not losing everything along with / our health,” grinding that gratitude into “we have all / but given up on finding a cure.” I ask myself if Ann’s poem dedicated to her physical therapist, “Angle of Recovery” (Spring, 2021, for Marion Mackles) is perhaps a sly reference to “Angle of Repose” by Wallace Stegner. (Wallace and Wallace, aha, perhaps?) And then in the book’s final poem, which I read first as a lightness, like the whispering of light over a small quiet creek. I read it again, and again, baffled and questioning:
We talk a lot about the little things,
the small decisions or delays that mean
you and not me, or me and not you,
is in the wrong, or the right, place
at the wrong, or the right, time.“The Infinity of Hope” (Spring, 2023)
When I first read the book by dipping and dabbling in the waters of its words, I confess I did not truly understand or appreciate the ferocious determination of the hopefulness in the closing poem, until I did.
Title: Days of Grace and Silence: A Chronicle of COVID’s Long Haul
Author: Ann E. Wallace
Publisher: Kelsay Books
Year: 2024
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About the Reviewer
P. F. Anderson self-identifies as a queer, non-binary, neurodivergent Jew with multiple disabilities, both visible and invisible, who has spent the pandemic time focused internally, quietly blurred out of the intensity of the pandemic by having Long COVID, from which they are still recovering 52 months later. P. F. Anderson writes both poetry and technical works, has an insatiable hunger for books (especially poetry), and struggles to declutter in mind and space and time.