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A Man Distraught by Love by Alan Feldman

A Man Distraught by Love by Alan Feldman

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How does a sequence of more than seventy sonnets written from the perspective of a husband whose wife is suffering from a relentless disease of the motor neurons keep from being repetitious and oppressive? How does the poet manage, while being unflinching in his chronicle of the wife’s slowly losing her power to walk and to speak, to be consistently surprising and engaging? That’s the aesthetic question at the heart of reading Alan Feldman‘s poignant, absorbing new book of poems. Part of the answer seems to be a function of his choosing to present the husband not in the first person but in the third, providing the distance the poet needs to view his protagonist critically in the round,  without self-pity, without special pleading. This husband is less a disembodied subjective consciousness and more a character rooted in particular times and settings that provide the poems with the furniture or ordinary life, with doors and windows that open, when needed, to let in light and air. And like the protagonist of a novel, the husband here is not only a fully embodied observer of the action but an active participant. He has a task to perform, to keep the marriage alive even as events conspire to starve it. He has to make the most of diminishing possibilities, so that the story of loss isn’t the only story that needs telling. What constitutes the great achievement of this book is the weaving of these stories in a way that consistently brings us along. This is clearly our story too.

–Carl Dennis, 2002 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, for Practical Gods

 

 

Of all the heartening things about this heartbreaking collection, it is the silent spectacle of Feldman finding space for his art-making self that is the most encouraging.  Before our eyes he breathes the free air art-making cannot fail to afford.  If he can do that, so can we. The co-existence of the hopeless, demanding situation with the undiminished play of mind and heart – not to mention craft and creativity – stirs our profound compassion, for sure, but also makes us want to cheer.

–Linda Bamber, professor emerita, Tufts University, author of Metropolitan Tang, from the introduction

 

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A Man Distraught by Love

by Alan Feldman

Full-length, Paper

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This title will be released on July 17, 2026

In A Man Distraught by Love, an artist is dying “one joy at a time,” and her husband, a poet, finds that he has become her caregiver. This book recounts in 14-line unrhymed sonnets—often like snapshots from their daily lives—the ins and outs of their struggle: hers to keep working and to live her remaining years as fully as possible, and his discovery, despite his age, of so much he never learned before. “A disorganized class with no lesson plan,” he reflects, “everything important in the final minutes.” By not writing about himself directly, but as a character in a story, Alan Feldman, an award-winning poet whose work has appeared in The Atlantic and The New Yorker, is able to look at himself as a struggling, flawed protagonist caught up in a story he never wanted to be living, rather than as a lyric poet pleading for our sympathy. He and his wife discover new sorts of pleasures: they love to ride their tricycles together; or they enjoy having dinner together, once while studying an ant haul of grain of sugar across the table. Yet they also suffer in a way they never have, including from the way a diagnosis has divided their fate. “That’s it: an unacceptable, ongoing disaster,” writes Linda Bamber in her introduction.  “Yet with its endless surprises, contradictions and new perspectives, [these poems offer] a sense of freedom and possibility alongside their grief . . . . The co-existence of the hopeless, demanding situation with the undiminished play of mind and heart–not to mention craft and creativity–stirs our profound compassion, for sure, but also makes us want to cheer.” Their story covers two winters in Florida, as well as life back home in Massachusetts, in and out of hospital and rehab, and even a cruise to Alaska with family, but it stops short of a phase the author says he finds “too hard to write about.” He prefers, instead, to conclude with his wife still painting, though in a new style she never asked for, and riding her recumbent tricycle too, the closest she can come to continuing to choose her own path, with the poet following, grieving, but thankful she’s still with him.

Alan Feldman is the author of Immortality, which was awarded the Massachusetts Book Award, and several other prize-winning collections. He and his wife, the painter Nan Hass Feldman, co-authored In the First Half-Century that I’ve Loved You in 2023.

 

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