Nova: In 2004, the poet Kevin Young received a phone call that split his life in two. His father had been killed in a hunting accident — sudden, inexplicable, devastating. In the weeks that followed, Young did what many of us do after loss: he went looking for a book. He wanted a collection of poems — something that could speak to his grief, keep him company in the dark. And he couldn't find one. Not a single anthology dedicated to the contemporary poetry of mourning.

Nova: Exactly. The result is "The Art of Losing: Poems of Grief and Healing," published in 2010 — a gathering of 150 poems by some of the greatest voices in modern poetry. The title, of course, comes from Elizabeth Bishop's famous villanelle "One Art" — you know the one: "The art of losing isn't hard to master." But what Young discovered, and what this book reveals, is that mastering loss is perhaps the hardest art there is.

Nova: That's what makes it so powerful. Young calls it a "poetry of necessity." These are poems that had to be written, and a collection that had to exist. The book became a lifeline — not just for Young, but for thousands of readers who've turned to it in their own moments of loss. Today, we're going to explore why this anthology matters, how it's structured, and what it teaches us about grief, healing, and the unique power of poetry to say what nothing else can.

Nova: Let's start with the void this book filled. Kevin Young, at the time of his father's death, was already a celebrated poet — a Harvard graduate who'd studied under Seamus Heaney, a National Book Award finalist for his collection "Jelly Roll." And yet, when he needed poems of consolation, the bookshelf offered him almost nothing.

Nova: There were academic studies of the elegy as a literary form. There were collections of the greatest hits — John Donne's "Death be not proud," that sort of thing. But nothing that captured the contemporary experience of grief. Nothing that spoke to how we actually mourn today. Young writes in his introduction: "Truth be known, I was surprised not to find this book already on bookstore shelves."

Nova: Precisely. He makes a crucial distinction between mourning and grief. Mourning is the public ritual — the funeral, the sympathy cards, the formal process. But grief? Grief is the bewildering, personal, often chaotic experience of losing someone. It doesn't follow a script. And Young wanted poems that honored that messiness.

Nova: That's the beautiful paradox of this anthology. Young has said that editing it became a form of companionship. He wasn't just assembling poems — he was finding fellow travelers. He describes the process of grief as mirroring the process of writing: "surprising, trying, frustrating, daunting, terrifying, comforting, chastening, challenging, and at times, heartening." The anthology became that journey in book form.

Nova: Here's where Young did something truly innovative. He didn't just throw 150 poems between two covers. He organized the book into six sections that trace the arc of grief itself — not the classic five stages of Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, mind you, but something more organic, more poetic.

Nova: The book opens with Reckoning. This is the immediate aftermath of loss — the world reeling, the imperative voice taking over. You hear it in Auden's "Funeral Blues," which Young read at his own father's service: "Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone." Or Dylan Thomas: "Do not go gentle into that good night." These are poems of command, of denial, of the mind refusing to accept what the heart already knows.

Nova: Exactly. Then comes Regret — where wishes collide with memory, where the last look and the unsaid words haunt you. Frank Bidart writes, "Woe is blunted not erased / by like." Then Remembrance — memory as both the parent and the child of grief. Then Ritual — the public and private ceremonies of mourning, from cleaning out a loved one's closet to pallbearing to the meal after the funeral.

Nova: Young writes beautifully about this. He describes driving around town looking for his father's dry cleaning, using old tags as a guide, thinking: "How to explain I'm looking for my dead father's clothes, things he'll never need?" And the dry cleaner refused payment. It was that small kindness, that everyday ritual of retrieval, that stayed with him.

Nova: Recovery — not a destination you arrive at, but something that surprises you. Young says recovery isn't inevitable. And finally, Redemption — which opens with Philip Larkin's "The Trees," with its astonishing line: "Their greenness is a kind of grief." The section ends with Ruth Stone: "All things come to an end. / No, they go on forever."

Nova: And that's what Young understood: you don't "get over" grief. You learn to carry it differently. As Larkin writes about the trees: "Begin afresh, afresh, afresh."

Nova: Let's talk about some of the voices that populate this extraordinary collection. Young includes 150 poems — spanning from the nineteenth century to the present day — by poets both canonical and contemporary.

Nova: Emily Dickinson is here, with her devastating precision: "After great pain, a formal feeling comes." Gerard Manley Hopkins with "Carrion Comfort" — Young includes a few nineteenth-century poets he considered "absolutely necessary and remarkably modern." And then the twentieth-century giants: W. H. Auden, Elizabeth Bishop, Dylan Thomas, Philip Larkin, Mary Oliver, Galway Kinnell, Derek Walcott, Wallace Stevens.

Nova: Absolutely. Natasha Trethewey — who would later become U. S. Poet Laureate — appears with her poem "Myth," a haunting villanelle about dreaming of the dead: "I was asleep while you were dying." Nick Flynn, Mary Jo Bang, Terrance Hayes, Lucille Clifton, Cornelius Eady — these are poets writing grief in real time.

Nova: Great observation. The villanelle — with its obsessive repetitions, its circling back — seems almost designed for grief. It's a form that says the same thing over and over, and each time it means something slightly different. Bishop's poem is the perfect example: "The art of losing isn't hard to master" — she repeats it like a mantra until that final devastating turn: "though it may look like like disaster."

Nova: Right. And Young argues that "Funeral Blues" may have inaugurated the contemporary elegy. Its dispassionate testimony, its blunt grief, its riffing off the musical blues form — the strict rhyme fighting the feeling of being blue. "He was my North, my South, my East and West, / My working week and my Sunday rest." There's a reason this poem endures. It captures that total disorientation of loss — the sense that the coordinates of your world have vanished.

Nova: That's one of the most cited poems in reviews of the book. It captures something essential — that grief is work, it's effort, it's trying to hold onto something that keeps slipping through your fingers. And there's responsibility in it too: those people waiting, thirsty. Your grief isn't just about you — it's about the living, about what you owe them.

Nova: Young opens his introduction with a striking phrase: "I have begun to believe in, and even to preach, a poetry of necessity." What he means is that the best poems don't come from a place of choice — they come from need. "No one wants to write an elegy," he says. "I presume we simply must."

Nova: That's exactly right. And this is what makes poetry uniquely suited to grief. Young puts it this way: "In death, everything else fails. We are left only with the music and the meaning of poetry." Music and meaning — sound and sense. A poem can do both at once. It can capture a fleeting feeling, hold it still, and make it beautiful.

Nova: Yes! John Berryman: "Nouns verbs do not exist for what I feel." C. K. Williams: "Shouldn't grief have a form of its own?" And perhaps most devastating, Joel Brouwer's poem "The Spots," about a loved one's illness: "The spots were like metaphors. They told us something / by showing us something else. And so I believed they were metaphors. // They were not."

Nova: But then, in the very next poem, Derek Walcott counters: "But out of what is lost grows something stronger // that has the rational radiance of stone." The anthology alternates between poems of defeat and poems of transcendence. That alternation mirrors the grieving process — you cycle between aphasia and articulation, between the failure of language and its redemption.

Nova: That's why people reach for poetry at weddings and funerals. It marks the occasion. It gives form to feeling. And as Young says, "It is in grief that we need some reminder of our humanity — and, sometimes, someone to say it for us." The poem becomes a kind of stand-in, a voice when your own voice fails.

Nova: That's such a crucial insight. Grief isn't all grand gestures. It's the small things — what Young calls "the countless little details that make life up, that in the throes of grief seem at once unbearable and meaningless." And then, as Galway Kinnell writes in "Wait": "Personal events will become interesting again. / Hair will become interesting. / Pain will become interesting." Life returns, but it returns through the particular, the mundane, the ordinary.

Nova: So here's what I think we can take away from Kevin Young's "The Art of Losing." First: grief needs company. This anthology exists because one grieving poet realized he wasn't alone — that across centuries, across cultures, poets have been trying to put words to the same impossible experience. The book is, at its core, a gathering of companions.

Nova: Third: poetry does something nothing else can. It holds paradox — that language fails and language is all we have. It captures both the specificity of loss and its universality. It makes music out of pain. As Young writes, "The poem can be both blunt — it can say it straight out — and also make music out of it, make metaphor, make meaning."

Nova: Kevin Young lost his father in 2004. He wrote about it in "Dear Darkness," returned to it in "Book of Hours," and created this anthology — a book that has since accompanied countless others through their own losses. He turned his grief into a gift. That's the art of losing — not mastery, but transformation.