The Empty Bed

Rachel Hadas's The Empty Bed takes an unflinching look at the loss of friends to AIDS and cancer, and commemorates the despair and rage of those left to grieve for the dead. Between 1991 and 1993, five of the poets with whom Hadas had worked at Gay Men's Health Crisis died, and in the midst of these deaths came that of the poet's mother. Written with the energy of desperation, the central section of The Empty Bed is devoted to a series of elegies -- private but also public laments almost secretly empowered by their formal schemes. The elegies are embraced by preparatory meditations on boundaries and thresholds; wise and passionate, these poems celebrate the consolations of friendship and of art. The collection is infused with a growing certainty that although the emptiness left by the deaths of loved ones can never be filled, it can be haloed and commemorated, and in that sense mitigated, by language.