Robin Durnford’s At Beckett’s Grave reimagines elegy not as closure, but as pause. Beckett presides over the volume, but he does not dominate it; alongside him appear Kafka, Dante, e. e. cummings, Dorothea Tanning, Claire Keegan, and others, their voices tessellating into Durnford’s own. The poems make palpable the experience of what it is to dwell in the interval between the present and the past. Arranged in two acts, the collection opens with birth, and this beginning complicates the logic of elegy, suggesting that grief and emergence are inseparable.

Again and again, her language tends toward submergence: “in the dirt of a bog,” amid the “eternal rhythms of the sea,” or against the “relentless spray” of the ocean. Durnford turns water into a metaphysics of grief, and immersion is her device for its unrelenting persistence.  The speaker loses herself, “edged / forgetful, the sea at ebb.” In another poem, she sheds her skin, and says “yes to the waves.” 

Loss moves from metaphor to embodiment, a saturation of the senses. Submergence leads to transformation elsewhere: “I have become / the rain.” This is not catharsis so much as a recognition of porousness, of how grief saturates and permeates: “waiting for form to take hold […] I overflow.” At Beckett’s Grave is bleak, but its bleakness is cathartic, illuminating, and beautiful. Durnford’s poems understand grief not as an aberration, but as an essential condition of life: as the medium in which we live, as the pause that defines what it means to speak at all.mRb