The Great Empty by Gary Duehr

Years after its peak, the COVID-19 pandemic will not leave us alone, much as we’d like to imagine its legacy is null. The Great Empty is an evocative contribution to the literature of that cataclysm. Gary Duehr vividly evokes the alienation and social abandonment which marked its onset, recalling what it was like when we learned it had gone far beyond a cruise-ship infestation. But the voice of this work does not settle for despair. The formal elegance and meditative quality of renga allow us space to attend to not only what disappeared, but also to what remains, to points of affirmation that are also still real. We need every strategy for resilience we can find.

–David Miller, author of Bend in the Stair and Sprawled Asleep

The spring, summer, and fall of 2020, we lost a half million people to the corona virus. We who lived through those early days of the pandemic feel it has changed everything, but we find it impossible to specify the change. We ask ourselves how to remember, witness, make sense of those months which seemed to have opened a chasm between past and future, or, in the words of Gary Duehr, “Before/After, Then and Now,” We feel it must make sense, and we find our stabs at finding meaning frustrating and elusive.

Now, in a marvelous and variegated tapestry of poems, Duehr has, with wit, vividness, and astuteness, given us the generous gift of The Great Empty as a kind of log of the first year of the plague, fashioned from his own experiences, sensations, emotions, thoughts, memories, and immediate and historic events. The largest mystery he confronts is the dull passionless stupor he diagnoses as the condition of our people in response to the pandemic. He weaves his tapestry together by a brilliant adaptation of the haiku-like Renga form, traditionally a conversation between collaborating poets. This Renga is an internal collaboration of Duehr with himself in which he adopts the role of a detached witness who contemplates an incredible variety of material bravely and honestly and enacts a kind of secular prayer, “Save our starving soul.”

–Bernard Horn is the author of Love’s Fingerprints and Our Daily Words.