The Lonely Years: Exploring Grief Through Poetry

In The Lonely Years, grief is a presence; you might wrestle with it, shove it down into a cellar, travel to a foreign land, or hope to hide your heart, but it doesn’t budge. Grief is on offer to everyone. G. Greene’s poems are a variety pack: lyric, logic, science, humor, feistiness, anecdote, and elegy, all offered to the reader with surprising wit and tenderness. Poems like the exquisite “Winter,” with its “…blue, beetled light,” or “If I Had Been Your Cat,” short and gritty with attitude, acknowledge grief’s pain from different angles. With The Lonely Years Greene extends the hand of human kinship and offers the wonderous powers of poetry itself as consolation.—Jody (Pamela) Stewart, author, The Red Window,Ghost Farm,and othersReading these poems, I’ve journeyed with a close friend into a world — his world — of great loss. It’s his personal experience, yet the words he writes resonate in my bones. What we have left when we lose a great love, forever, is here — if you dare to look.—Michael Moschen, juggler, MacArthur Fellow, and subject, PBS “Great Performances: Michael Moschen in Motion”In these poems, G. Greene writes about the profound grief that took hold of him and would not let him go when his wife died. His pain is raw and palpable, and so profoundly human. His poems seem to bypass the page and make their way directly into the reader’s heart.—Dr. Anne Buchanan, retired Senior Research Professor of Anthropology (Pennsylvania State University) and coauthor, The Mermaid’s Tale: Four Billion Years of Cooperation in the Making of Living Things Read more