Grief is a subject so universal it seems incredulous that there would be anything more to say about it that hasn’t already been said, and yet Miranda Pearson’s most recent collection, Bridestones (McGill-Queen’s University Press), says the unsaid in a way that makes it completely familiar. In “The White Room,” the poem that opens the collection, Pearson describes the moment after her mother takes her last breath, in a statement as obvious as it is profoundly resonant: “I was alone.” In “Clearance,” Pearson finds meaning in that excruciating, yet strangely mundane experience—the emptying of a dead parent’s house. The gradual hollowing-out of her mother’s house becomes a terrifying and accurate image of loss. The poem concludes with a series of meditations on the final absence of parents, a late-in-life orphaning that bewilders, in a landscape fractured by grief and shadowed by scudding clouds, drenched with rain. The collection is grounded in closely observed places—England, Canada, the neighbourhoods of Vancouver (Trout Lake, Kitsilano)—and language that is clear and precise; simple sentences serve as a reminder that fewer words can sometimes make space for deeper emotional resonance. It’s been a pleasure to see Pearson’s growing mastery of craft displayed in her five previous volumes; Bridestones is a remarkable achievement. —Geoff Inverarity

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