Post #3: Dawn Lundy Martin (3/18/15)

This week in class some of the prominent work we discussed was written by a contemporary poet named Dawn Lundy Martin. Martin's poetry strikes as very powerful not only in the language that she uses, but particularly in the fashion that the sentences are structured to call to mind very poignant and direct types of situations. The very first poem where she is discussing her father's death caught my attention at the beginning. Martin seems focused primarily on the important "living" details of her father's existence at the start, and these sentences which depict how her father functions at death's door form a shattering prologue of sorts that transitions into a new style of language, one that relies on the coming abstraction of death. Martin talks about the largeness of death, the idea of death as an inconceivable notion, a never-ending silence. She speaks of capturing her father's life as a photograph, a muscle memory of sorts that remembers the details of what used to encompass his life, held in suspension for one eternal moment. Accepting death and having the ability to preserve what is humanly possible of one's life. Titanic concepts for the living to attempt to understand, that's for certain.