Tweetspeak Poetry

  • Home
  • FREE prompts
  • Earth Song
  • Every Day Poems—Subscribe! ✨
  • Teaching Tools
  • Books, Etc.
  • Patron Love

Poets and Poems: Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer and “The Unfolding”

By Glynn Young 2 Comments

Snowy trail Trommer

Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer uses poetry to explore grief and find hope.

More than 20 years ago, my oldest son had two best friends who were brothers. My son fit right between them chronologically; they’d met at church, participated in the youth group, went on mission trips, and generally hung out at all other times. The brothers were at our house as much as they at their own, and we loved having them around. All three went to different colleges, but they saw each other at breaks, talked all the time on email and the phone, and generally stayed very close.

And then, one weekend, the news came. The oldest boy had killed himself.

You don’t get over news like that. Especially if you’re the family, but also if you’re the close friend, or even the family of the close friend. I still see them coming in the front door, with snacks and a couple of boxes of Kraft macaroni and cheese (which the youngest boy seemed addicted to). I hear their laughter, the joking, and the affectionate insults. I see their smiles; the oldest boy always had a friendly grin on his face, while his brother was something of a prankster.

Time had dulled those memories. Then I read The Unfolding, a collection of poems about the grief following suicide and another death. And the hope that eventually grew.

In August of 2021, Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer was in Georgia with her husband, daughter, and son, helping her parents move into a retirement home. Two nights later, her 19-year-old son committed suicide. Later that year, her father died of kidney failure. Two close family deaths, close together. One inexplicable. One understandable, but still a loss.

Trommer’s The Unfolding isn’t about the stages of grief. I don’t think that kind of loss can have stages, which imply gradually getting over it, coming to terms, and acceptance. Suicide doesn’t work like that.

What she went looking for was how to describe how the shock, the pain, the grief, the memories, and the death will always be there. And how hope is born in the midst of that, and how that how eventually leads her to praise. What she discovered was that the English Language is limited for synonyms of praise, the kind she was experiencing and trying to describe. And so she invented four of her own words and gave them definitions: verilujah, sorrom, samunion, and pangloria. They become the headings of the four sections of the collection’s almost 90 poems.

This is a poem from the “Sorrom” section. She defines the word as “a paradoxical praise for beauty, love, strength and connections that can only emerge as we wrestle with devastation, grief and the worries and pains of daily living; a positive side-effect of surrender and trust in life and death.”

All at Once

The Unfolding TrommerBefore I woke, my son and I
were eating breakfast—

a beautiful brown-crusted boule,
warm from the oven,

and he was slicing it and making
a giant mess of it,

the bread tearing and smushing,
and we were laughing—

his head was thrown back
with the joy of making a mess,

carefree and goofy and foolish.
Crumbs everywhere.

God, how I loved him
as he smashed a hardboiled egg

onto the uneven slice.
How I loved him

as he stuffed his mouth
with the botched bread and egg.

How I loved him as we laughed
and laughed and laughed.

How I loved him when I woke
and he was dead,

his absence making the love
no less beautiful, no less true,

our laughter no less mirthful
in the empty room.

That one floored me. Most of the poems in The Unfolding floored me, in fact, requiring deep breaths to steady myself. They bring back what happened, but they also point a way forward.

Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer

Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer

Trommer has published several poetry collections, including Celebration: The Christmas Candle Book, Insatiable, Holding Three Things at Once, The Miracle Already Happening, The Less I Hold, Naked for Tea, Hush, and All the Honey. She’s also published Even Now: Poems and Drawings, Interior Landscape: The Four Corners Region in Poetry and Photography, and If You Listen: Poems & Photographs of the San Juan Mountains. She publishes a poem a day at her blog, A Hundred Falling Veils. She has a podcast on poetry and conducts poetry workshops. Her poems have won a number of prizes, included in anthologies, and been published in O Magazine, A Prairie Home Companion, PBS News Hour, American Life in Poetry, and many others. She lives in Colorado with her family.

The poems of The Unfolding were born in the depths of unfathomable pain, with constant reminders of the person who was but is physically no longer. And yet, the person is still part of your heart and always will be. And for that, you’re grateful.

These are poems to cherish.

Photo by Trenten Kelley, Creative Commons, via Flickr. Post by Glynn Young.

Browse more book reviews

How to Read a Poem by Tania Runyan

5 star

Buy How to Read a Poem Now!

How to Read a Poem uses images like the mouse, the hive, the switch (from the Billy Collins poem)—to guide readers into new ways of understanding poems. Anthology included.

“I require all our incoming poetry students—in the MFA I direct—to buy and read this book.”

—Jeanetta Calhoun Mish

  • Author
  • Recent Posts
Glynn Young
Glynn Young
Editor and Twitter-Party-Cool-Poem-Weaver at Tweetspeak Poetry
Glynn Young lives in St. Louis where he retired as the team leader for Online Strategy & Communications for a Fortune 500 company. Glynn writes poetry, short stories and fiction, and he loves to bike. He is the author of the Civil War romance Brookhaven, as well as Poetry at Work and the Dancing Priest Series. Find Glynn at Faith, Fiction, Friends.
Glynn Young
Latest posts by Glynn Young (see all)
  • A History of Children’s Stories: “The Haunted Wood” by Sam Leith - May 20, 2025
  • World War II Had Its Poets, Too - May 15, 2025
  • Czeslaw Milosz, 1946-1953: “Poet in the New World” - May 13, 2025

Filed Under: article, book reviews, Books, Grief Poems, Poems, poetry, poetry reviews, Poets

Try Every Day Poems...

Comments

  1. Bethany R. says

    November 25, 2024 at 2:44 pm

    I’m so sorry for those of you grieving ongoing losses. My heart goes out to you. Thank you for sharing this, Glynn.

    My eyes are full of tears here as I’ve finished reading the poem. Such a beautiful, natural pouring out of this dream scene— and then the awakening.

    I think this is the third poem in the last three weeks I’ve read of hers and loved.

    Reply
    • Glynn says

      November 25, 2024 at 5:44 pm

      It’s a fine collection, Bethany.

      Reply

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Take How to Read a Poem

Get the Introduction, the Billy Collins poem, and Chapter 1

get the sample now

Welcome to Tweetspeak

New to Tweetspeak Poetry? Start here, in The Mischief Café. You're a regular? Check out our May Menu

Patron Love

❤️

Welcome a little patron love, when you help keep the world poetic.

The Graphic Novel

"Stunning, heartbreaking, and relevant illustrations"

Callie Feyen, teacher

read a summary of The Yellow Wallpaper

meet The Yellow Wallpaper characters

How to Write Poetry

Your Comments

  • Glynn on World War II Had Its Poets, Too
  • Sandra Fox Murphy on World War II Had Its Poets, Too
  • Glynn on Poets and Poems: Kelly Belmonte and “The Mother of All Words”
  • Bethany R. on Poets and Poems: Kelly Belmonte and “The Mother of All Words”

Featured In

We're happy to have been featured in...

The Huffington Post

The Paris Review

The New York Observer

Tumblr Book News

Stay in Touch With Us

Categories

Learn to Write Form Poems

How to Write an Acrostic

How to Write a Ballad

How to Write a Catalog Poem

How to Write a Ghazal

How to Write a Haiku

How to Write an Ode

How to Write a Pantoum

How to Write a Rondeau

How to Write a Sestina

How to Write a Sonnet

How to Write a Villanelle

5 FREE POETRY PROMPTS

Get 5 FREE inbox poetry prompts from the popular book How to Write a Poem

Shakespeare Resources

Poetry Classroom: Sonnet 18

Common Core Picture Poems: Sonnet 73

Sonnet 104 Annotated

Sonnet 116 Annotated

Character Analysis: Romeo and Juliet

Character Analysis: Was Hamlet Sane or Insane?

Why Does Hamlet Wait to Kill the King?

10 Fun Shakespeare Resources

About Shakespeare: Poet and Playwright

Top 10 Shakespeare Sonnets

See all 154 Shakespeare sonnets in our Shakespeare Library!

Explore Work From Black Poets

About Us

  • • A Blessing for Writers
  • • Our Story
  • • Meet Our Team
  • • Literary Citizenship
  • • Poet Laura
  • • Poetry for Life: The 5 Vital Approaches
  • • T. S. Poetry Press – All Books
  • • Contact Us

Write With Us

  • • 5 FREE Poetry Prompts-Inbox Delivery
  • • 30 Days to Richer Writing Workshop
  • • Poetry Prompts
  • • Submissions
  • • The Write to Poetry

Read With Us

  • • All Our Books
  • • Book Club
  • • Every Day Poems—Subscribe! ✨
  • • Literacy Extras
  • • Poems to Listen By: Audio Series
  • • Poet-a-Day
  • • Poets and Poems
  • • 50 States Projects
  • • Charlotte Perkins Gilman Poems Library
  • • Edgar Allan Poe Poems Arts & Experience Library
  • • William Blake Poems Arts & Experience Library
  • • William Shakespeare Sonnet Library

Celebrate With Us

  • • Poem on Your Pillow Day
  • • Poetic Earth Month
  • • Poet in a Cupcake Day
  • • Poetry at Work Day
  • • Random Acts of Poetry Day
  • • Take Your Poet to School Week
  • • Take Your Poet to Work Day

Gift Ideas

  • • Every Day Poems
  • • Our Shop
  • • Everybody Loves a Book!

Connect

  • • Donate
  • • Blog Buttons
  • • By Heart
  • • Shop for Tweetspeak Fun Stuff

Copyright © 2025 Tweetspeak Poetry · FAQ, Disclosure & Privacy Policy