“After Image” Review: Frozen with Grief, Thawing with Acceptance

Written by Jenny George, “After Image” is a compact poetry collection that was released on Oct. 8 by Copper Canyon Press. At 67 pages of poetry, “After Image” centers around the theme of grief, specifically the grief of losing a partner. With surreal, fleeting yet repeating imagery, George reminds us that the transience of life is natural, albeit scary and sorrowful.

As I alluded to before, this is a fairly short read, even for a poetry collection. This is made true by both the length of “After Image” as a whole and the lengths of its individual poems; most of the poems in this collection do not exceed a page in length. Therefore, the effect achieved is a set of poems that leave about as quickly as they enter, blitzing with the panic and trauma that comes from a loss that is both sudden and gradual. 

The poems in “After Image” are drenched in the whiplash of the past and present, of the alive and so-soon-dead. One stunning example of this is in the poem titled “Migration,” where George describes a murder of crows as “souls / who want back in life,” as beings so restless with unfinished business in human life that they track and haunt humans who are still alive, living vicariously through them. The crows in “Migration” live in a kind of limbo between life and death, similar to George’s descriptions and depicted feelings about her late partner.

Through the use of repeated symbols, George paints the picture of what happened to her partner, who died during an unprecedented squall in late April after suffering from an unnamed long-term illness. Her death left George with all of these symbols that remind her of their time alive together, like bees, various flowers, Orpheus and Eurydice, the rising moon, orchards and gardens. If you like symbols that help you track the dynamics of a poetry collection, then “After Image” is for you.

Of course, the most potent and repeated symbol in the collection is snow, which is presented as both a bringer of death and a revealer of new life. The first poem that mentions snow in “After Image” is the second poem, titled “Ars Poetica.” After “Ars Poetica,” 13 of the remaining 55 poems in the collection implement an image of snow, ice or melting. In other words, about a quarter of “After Image” hinges on the image of snow. 

Because of this, even though snow is symbolically and literally an essential part of the story of how George’s partner passed away, it felt to me that there was a slight overreliance on the symbol. To me, this made it hard to justify the snow as feeling “sudden” throughout the poems, like the squall in late April that plays a huge role in George’s partner’s passing. Then again, not every use of snow in the collection was meant to be sudden. In poems like “Spring,” snow is exclusively described as “melt-pools,” implying a reveal of grief-imbued memorabilia underneath the snow. However, most mentions of the symbol have to do with either incoming snow or the sudden squall of snow, and the sheer repetition of the snow imagery makes it feel as if the snow is neither incoming nor sudden, but already and always here. 

With that being said, this concentration on such an image in nature that takes on a traumatic connotation might be very intentional. After all, the poem titled “Jenny George” does lead in with the line “Is writing about snow again.” After this, it seems that George is deeply aware of this repetition, and is trying to find a way out through obsessive articulation. In fact, the last couplet of the poem “First Snowdrop” reads “as if the instructions are: / to articulate.” Despite all of this, the symbol is mentioned so much that to me, it feels somewhat forced at times, which takes much of its power away upon each individual mention.

The gap in snow imagery between pages 36 and 58 of “After Image” is also where the first inklings of the collection’s volta, or change in tone or thought, takes form. In my opinion, the poem titled “Eurydice” on page 38 is the first poem in the collection that makes the leap from being marred by grief to finding some sense of solace after mourning. The next poem in the collection that begins to evoke this feeling is called “The Artist” on page 43. 

However, the leap towards solace does not truly take hold until “Orpheus Ascending” 15 pages later, with lines like “I wait for song / to grow in me across the dark interval,” implying a level of preparing to move on from mourning. This is late in the collection to have confirmation of a change in tone. Even though this frustrated me as a reader at first (especially when combined with the repetition of symbols and images in poems prior), after rereading “After Image” and spotting moments like “Eurydice” and “The Artist,” this decision makes sense to me now. Besides, who moves on from grief quickly, especially grief from the loss of someone as close as your partner? You cannot see clearly until you stop crying, which usually takes quite some time to pass.

The process of moving on in “After Image” comes to a head in the poem “Opening of the Mouth Ceremony,” which describes George performing the Egyptian ritual of endowing her late partner with all of her senses in the afterlife. In the poem, this is done by using a bronze, forked blade to open her partner’s mouth so she can use her mouth “for speech / in the afterlife.” Without giving too much away, it is a touching final scene that alleviates the tension built throughout the collection. Above everything, it finally felt like acceptance.

Overall, “After Image” implements strung-together images and metaphors to not only tell the story of George mourning her late partner, but also to mitigate the pressure that this grief forced onto her. Ultimately, through “After Image,” George finds a way to memorialize, mourn and accept the past she and her partner had despite its abrupt yet slow end, which is much more difficult to execute than anyone can even begin to imagine. If you have lost someone close to you recently (or ever), I would recommend reading this collection. Through sharing “After Image” with us, George provides a space for us to mourn along with her.

A huge thank you to Copper Canyon Press for sending me an Advanced Reader Copy of “After Image!” It was an honor to have read it before its release for review.

Michael Indovina is a senior double-majoring in studio art and English with a concentration in creative writing, and a minor in theater arts.

Featured image courtesy of Pexels.com.