You Kept Your Secrets by Helen Marie Casey

In You Kept Your Secrets about her grandson’s suicide at age 18, poet Helen Marie Casey writes, “I am afraid to look, afraid there will be nothing everywhere.” But she does look—with love, grief, and beauty—at the measure of his height still on the wall, at the tree where he hanged himself, at the hawk she hopes her grandson has become. “Sometimes that is everything there is.”

It’s a sad and lovely book.
–Penelope Scambly Schott, Oregon Book Award recipient and author of On Dufur Hill.  

In this deeply affecting collection, Helen Marie Casey chronicles the aftermath—and persistence—of loss in the absence of a beloved child.  “What do we become when we cease to be/who we were?” the poet asks, a question that resonates for subject, author, and reader alike.  These poems both celebrate a brief life, “you,/young boy, hawk-like, spreading/your sweatered wings wide” and map the ever-widening circles of pain and joy.

 –Susan Edwards Richmond, Before We Were Birds