Noa Grey uses poetry to describe a lingering condition of sadness
One of my earliest memories involves my mother, sitting in the screened porch between our kitchen and the carport. I might have been 4 or 5, and she would have been in her early 30s. She had her legs drawn up under her, and she was holding a handkerchief, crying. I asked her why, and she said she was just feeling sad.
Decades later, when she was reaching the end of her life, I asked her if she remembered that. She did, and she was 89. She said she felt terrible that I had found her crying, but she had been deeply unhappy. I had unexpectedly walked in on it. She said that, at the time, she was realizing that her life was turning into something entirely different from what she had imagined when she was younger, and she felt like it was losing a dream.
Sadness is a word I associate with her. It’s a condition that can come from many sources — disappointment, loss, health setbacks, family upheavals, or sometimes no reason at all, to mention only a few. It’s a very human condition, something we’ve all experienced to varying degrees.
The poet and novelist writing under the pseudonym Noa Grey writes of lifelong experience with sadness. I can’t say for certain whether Grey is a man or a woman, but I have the impression it’s the latter, and the Amazon description says “her.” so I’ll use feminine pronouns. She’s in her forties, she writes in the introduction, and says she’s been good at sadness, even as a child. And perhaps good as masking it. She says she’s using a pen name as “an escape from my very vigorous engineering job.” And she writes that it took decades “to understand the depth of my sadness doesn’t make me the wrong kind of human.”
I would say that sadness makes Grey very human indeed.
With that as all the biographical information available, we turn to the poems in The Elegance of Sadness. It’s a relatively short collection of 45 pages, closer to a chapbook. Most of the poems are short, encapsulating a simple idea of observation, bur a few are longer.
The title poem is first, and it was the one that captured my attention, holding it for reading everything that followed. It was the one that seemed to capture my starstruck mother, who loved Hollywood movies and dressing up to go out.
The Elegance of Sadness
I wear my sadness
Like a Chanel No. 5,
Like a movie star
Wears her dress on the red carpet,
A queen her crown and the sky its sunset.
I did not know
It takes ten thousand tears
And ten thousand more to
Learn how to do it,
But I’ve shed them anyway
And each one gave me my sadness
A touch more class.
You know that smile?
Beautiful, yet distant,
Lips smiling, but eyes lot far away
Between clouds and bad memories
Longing for a never to come something?
When you see it in the mirror,
You know you’ve made it,
Your sadness is now Vogue worthy.
Grey goes on to write that you don’t need a guide or map to sadness. We find it, or it finds us. It can be a single tear, or a day when it cascades. We can’t really Google our way out of it, she says. She likens it to a violin crying (which makes me think of the theme to the movie Schindler’s List).
She explains loss as not the physical presences you lose, and describes how sadness changes as you age. And another aspect that reminded me of my mother: “The sinking feeling…/That you missed your moment?/ Of greatness.” And there is a kind of sadness that reminded me of myself, when she hears her father growling with his fist held high, raging not to take her ailing mother first.
The Elegance of Sadness describes a common human condition. Perhaps that’s why you can see so much of yourself and people you know in it. As Grey writes, “We see sadness / In so many faces / And so many mirrors”.
Photo by gnuckx, Creative Commons, via Flickr. Post by Glynn Young.
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
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