Martyn Hesford turns to poetry to understand his grief.
I don’t know if grief is really a thing with feathers. Sometimes I think of it as a ghost, sometimes there, sometimes gone, but able to suddenly appear and startle you almost to tears. My father died nearly 40 years ago; grief didn’t hit me until three years after his death. My mother died 12 years ago; I felt it immediately. My half-sister, 11 years older, died several years ago; it felt like part of my childhood died, the time I knew her best. My half-brother, eight years older, died last year, and that one hit me harder than all the others. The best and worst conversation of my life was our last phone call, when he knew he’d die soon and was saying goodbye.
But all these griefs return, not at once and not with the same intensity. Some dull with time; some don’t. The ghosts of grief are likely a measure of the strength and depth of the relationship. What I’ve learned is that grief, with all its ghosts, can be another form of love.
These thoughts about griefs and family and ghosts came bubbling up when I read Ash Light: Poems, the latest poetry collection by Martyn Hesford. (The collection is available through both Amazon UK and the publisher, Grey Swan Press.) I’d read his Lilac White: Poems and thoroughly enjoyed it. I’d also seen the movie Mrs. Lowry & Son (2019), the 2019 movie about the British painter L.S. Lowry, starring Timothy Spall and Vanessa Redgrave, for which Hesford was the screenwriter. (The movie is a gem.)
In 2022, Hesford’s partner of more than 40 years, Dr. Keith Summer. The collection contains 30 poems, 29 by Hesford and the final one by Summer. And Hesford and Summer both had discovered the ghosts of grief.
The poems are numbered. All are relatively short. Reading them can be painful, but they’re more than simply poems about pain and loss. Hesford is also remembering, and I suspect he and I share the same definition of grief – a measure of love and depth of relationship.
12
A single candle
brings
shadow
light.
I eat a meal alone;
the silence
is the longest.
Loss is not something you “get over;” it’s not about someone “being in a better place.” It’s not even experiencing loneliness. It’s more like knowing that some part of you is gone.
19
I see people walking outside,
the passing of a too-fast car.
I spend the day on the sofa,
waiting for sleep.
No phone.
No doorbell answered.
Clouds move ever so slowly here.
The best days
are when it rains.
Sometimes I eat a chocolate—
not feeding hunger,
feeding emptiness.
Martyn Hesford
Grief is an ache, a longing, and a knowing that something familiar and fundamental has changed. Hesford captures all of that in these simple, beautiful poems. The grasps the mortality of all of us, but the personal size of the grief is a reflection of the size of the love.
Hesford has also published Lilac White (2022), The Moon is Blue (2021), a children’s story; Snow Star (2021), a poetry collection; The Mystical Boy (2023); and The Glass Supper (2014), a drama. He’s also been an actor and screenwriter.
As we grow older, we learn to live with our griefs, our ghosts. They are part of who we are, how we looked and look at life, and how we live. In Ash Light, Hesford captures all of that, pointedly, succinctly, and rather profoundly.
Related:
Martyn Hesford and Lilac White.
Photo by Hiroyuki Takeda, 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
- Poets and Poems: Martyn Hesford and “Ash Light” - August 13, 2026
- Poets and Poems: Sally Nacker and “My Wild Yard” - August 11, 2026
- Poets and Poems: Tamara Madison and “Morpheus Dips His Oar” - August 6, 2026
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