Which of us has not looked intently at the markings of age in others and then looked for those markings in ourselves? Which of us doesn’t hope for some wisdom to come along with the signs of aging? Which of us doesn’t hope it all means something?

Finally, we have a volume of poems on aging by the great contemporary poets: Lasting: Poems on Aging rivets readers to its subject with 158 poems by 105 poets. Each of the poems has a place in a chorus that sings about timelessness amidst impermanence, about the transitory, both beautiful and terrifying. The poems in this volume (among the poets included are Billy Collins, Anthony Hecht, Tess Gallagher, Tony Hoagland, Pattiann Rogers and Stanley Plumly) help us focus on and admire our beloved, mortal lives, though they be filled with coming decline. Jane Hirschfield tells us this in “This Was Once a Love Poem,” which is included toward the book’s closing section:

When it finds itself disquieted
By the pure and unfamiliar silence of its new life,
It will touch them–one, then another–
With a single finger outstretched like a tiny flame.

No review of this book can summarize the deep resonance of each poem let alone the deeper resonance of the whole. Writing in memoriam for his aunt, Thomas R. Smith creates “Daffodils for Aunt Vic,” a poem composed of 13 two-line stanzas. In it he fills the reader in: “asked by a granddaughter to accompany / her by bus to Ohio, you remarked, // “I can only wear myself out once, / so it might as well be for you.” I imagine editor Meg Files might well have repeated these lines as she collected and chose the poems that carry out the idea behind the book’s conception–to use the work of poets and their way of viewing life through the kaleidoscope of senses and perceptions to find words that describe what aging feels like in the individual and for the collective.

A frequent correspondent to Writing It Real (her articles include: From High Midnight, Letter to a Young Perfectionist, Research and Creative Writing, Servings Per Container, The Most Promising Fictional Characters are Obsessed), Meg answered several questions I emailed to her just after I read the poems in this significant and moving project:

 Sheila
Where did the idea for the anthology come from?

Meg
The Pima Press Board members, none of us exactly youngsters, were talking about the first of the baby boomers’ turning 60 this year. Among them are Cher, Steven Spielberg, Connie Chung, Jimmy Buffet, and Linda Ronstadt. Sixty may be the new 40, but, still, aging is on our minds. We thought poets might have a lot to say about the experiences of what aging does to the body, the mind, and the spirit—and boy did they! When we invited famous poets to contribute to the book, they sent us poems by the hundreds.

Sheila
How has collecting and considering the poems impacted you?

Meg
I must say, initially I worried about spending countless hours wallowing in poems full of depression and self-pity. I certainly didn’t want the book to be depressing. But I didn’t want it to be a pep talk or a how-to-grow-old gracefully manual, either. Nor did I want it to be in any way sentimental, which would be a denial of reality.

Once I dove into the poems, I knew my worries were groundless. The poems are full of humor. They offer perspective. They gave me lessons such as Stephen Dunn’s: “A heart is to be spent.” It’s not going too far to say that these brave poems are helping me face my own mortality and teaching me how to be fully alive in the rest of my years.

Sheila
What is your hope for the anthology and the poets and poetry lovers who read it?

Meg
The book can be a way to open up discussion on uncomfortable topics such as coping with parents with Alzheimer’s or the body’s disintegration or memory loss, even death. There’s an intimacy here.

I hope the book will reach a wide audience. Perhaps, because of its subject, it will attract some who don’t typically choose poetry to read. I’d like to think the book may help dispel myths and misconceptions about poetry, that it’s “intellectual,” that it’s a puzzle, that it’s all about “hidden meanings,” or that it’s mushy sentimentality. Because many of the poems in the collection are playful, funny, narrative, and accessible, I expect the book to awaken new readers to the special sorts of truth found in poetry.

I gave my father a copy of the book. He’s 86, a retired veterinarian. . . not a big fan of poetry. He told me he loved the whole book but he read all the poems about sex first.

Poems help make sense of things, they allow us to figure out some answers to the big questions about life and death, and—not to get too grandiose here—I believe they can transform the finality of aging and death.

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And Meg tells us more of the anthology’s story in her tender introduction to the collection:

Recently I came upon a file folder I hadn’t seen for thirty years. Labeled “Old Age:’ it was the repository of little notes to myself and quotes and clippings. This manila time capsule includes a letter from my mother reminding me–why? I wonder now–that “getting old sure beats the alternative.” Neither of us knew then that she would die at 61. On blue paper I’d copied Dylan Thomas’s lines: “Old age should burn and rave at close of day; / Rage, rage against the dying of the light.” Here’s a brittle article from a Sunday supplement on the health benefits of a positive attitude for “golden-agers” And a piece of advice to my future self: “If you have false teeth, wear them.”

My file of mixed messages may mirror the general ambivalence. Hearing that I was editing a book of poems on the subject of aging, people had two distinct reactions: “Great! I need to read that” or “Who’d want to read such a downer of a book?”

Most people don’t even know what words to use. In his poem “Assisted Living,” Peter Meinke observes that “Language is queer: adult movies / mean fucking but adult centers / mean dying though both mean / without dignity in front of others.”

In this book, poets have found the language to examine aging and its non-alternative.

The first part, “Looking at Aging Faces,” offers views from outside. We learn, for instance, how approaching death can send us backward, perhaps to resist going forward. The father in AI Zolynas’ poem “My Father, at the Age of Eighty-Three, Shows Up at the Family Reunion, Sporting an Amazing Beard” seems “no longer fit for this planet.” “Nothing seems familiar,” the son writes, “but the distant call, quiet and insistent, heard / like the murmur of wind in grass / or the ocean breaking on a shore.”

Other poets also write about their aging parents. Sandra Gilbert notes her 97-year-old mother’s insistence: “Listen, Sandra, / I’m still too young / to be shelved like this.” How is it for our parents and for those left to interpret their aging, sometimes their dementia, their deaths? In Donald Finkel’s “Leavings,” a mother tries to escape her rest home: “Some rest, she wheezed, / and hailed a patrol car: Take me to the Hilton, cabby.” Groping for her purse she “felt her heart snap open, all but empty: / one lime LifeSaver, shrouded in lint, / two lichen-green pennies to rest on her eyes.”

Some poems draw portraits of old people. (And they aren’t all sweet or wise. In William Pitt root’s “Passing Go,” a old woman gets out of paying bus fare by saying something, well, inappropriate.) Some portraits are dedications to other poets.

The last poems in this section look at what’s to come. There are warnings about whom we don’t want to become, like the “old man with huge ankles” in Jefferson Carter’s poem “Foul Mouth” who snarls at his wife, “Help me, goddamit! I’m / the one who’s dying.” Tricia Cherin’s “Role Models” presents a different, sadly optimistic approach, observing that “even last week’s widows have newly washed hair / knowing already that fresh love / is their only hope.” There’s advice, such as Marge Piercy’s in “The lived in look,” about what to remember and what to let go. “This is the sweet imprint of your life / and loves upon the rumpled sheets / of your days. Relax. Breathe deeply. Mess will make us free.”

The old woman in David St. John’s “Grace Harbour” “believed those days she might have / Forever even though she knew better & why.” All of us, knowing what’s to come, might pray as in Kim Addonizio’s “Getting Older,” that memory is enough “to last, if it has to, the rest of your life.”

The second section of the book, “Being Old, Still Playing,” includes the most poems. Everyone, it seems, has plenty to say about the experiences of getting and being old.

The first poems examine what happens to the body. Ruth Stone captures the unnerving sense of change: “My true self has been stitched to another face.” Bernardo Taiz almost proudly catalogs his changes: “Vascular system gridlocked, / vertebrae re-configured, / a foot of colon excised here, / a grand toe bonsai’d there.” W.D. Snodgrass gets a pacemaker to “Keep this old lame dog synchronized, / Steady, sparked up, still in the race.” Gary Soto says that these days “I have to help my body parts.” Still, though–“Fellas, sour liver / And trusty kidney, I’m full of hope.”

Poems about the body segue into explorations of what aging can do to the mind and memory, and then into poems about the effects of aging on long relationships, and then, quite naturally, into sex. Sam Hamill writes that an orchid blossoming is “Erotic because there’s death / at the heart of birth.” C.K. Williams notes the proximity: “sex and death: how close / they can seem. / So constantly conscious now of death moving toward me, sometimes I / think I confound them.” Tricia Cherin’s poem “Last Fucks” observes that “somber abandon” is “such good practice / for the near oblivion.”

This section ends with poems about enduring. In “Witness,” Donald Hall reminds us that “Each September / day is the last day.” Alicia Ostriker asks: “And when the clock says Almost / Quitting time, do you still answer Never?

The final section, “Coming to the Secret Names of Stars,” is about final things: what will come, the finality of aging, death, and coming to terms with mortality. Peter Meinke’s poem “The Death of Friends” faces–despite the stories we try to tell ourselves about how we go on after death–the absolute finality. Still, poets cannot help contemplating an afterlife, as in Maxine Kumin’s “Summer Meditation”: “If only death could be / like going to the movies. / You get up afterward / and go out / saying, how was it?”

Taken together, the poems become a conversation, with questions and answers, with the exchange and play of fine talk–Peter Meinke’s finality, people absolutely blipped out, and then Philip Levine’s Yes, but: at the end “taking nothing, giving / nothing, empty, and free at last”; Gene Frumkin’s “Silence will come” and then Donald Finkel’s Yes, but: “As the last syllable crept away, / he felt a peculiar light,” “as if words were the burden / he’d been bearing, all his life.”

Lasting is, finally, a collective coming to terms with mortality. How?
One way is with humor, as with Alvin Greenberg’s “this is the way it usually goes: just a little at a time, / the body’s integrity peeling away like your old white ford, / losing a right side mirror, then the left quarter’s chrome trim, / the antenna, the rear bumper, the passenger side door handle,” as with Billy Collins’ “Forgetfulness”: “It is as if, one
One, the memories you used to harbor / decide to retire to the southern hemisphere of the brain, / to a little fishing village where there are no phones.”

Perspective helps the coming to terms. “…For even sorrow / Seems bearable when studied at a distance,” writes Dana Gioia in “The Lost Garden.” Yet even as we reconcile ourselves, there’s the little sweet grief of possibilities now impossible: “To know the past forever lost yet seeing / Behind the wall a garden still in blossom.”

Sometimes a rebellious attitude can help. In “Gotterdammerung,” Rita Dove insists: “To hell with wisdom. They’re all wrong. / I’ll never be through with my life.”

At last, the book offers the understanding that may allow the final coming to terms, and it does it as only poets can–not settling for moans or self-pity, but taking the grim subject of the body’s decline and going somewhere with it. And the somewhere is often an affirmation: Leslie Ullman pledges in “Hot Flash Continuum” “… to stay / aboard, through hell and high water, this body / so much mine, awash in its / season, open to every kiss of air.” The somewhere is often a startled recognition, as in Chase Twichell’s “The Ceiling”: “Look at my 52-year-old legs, / starting to ache / for their last lover, the dirt.”

Awareness of mortality gives us lessons, such as Stephen Dunn’s: “A heart is to be spent.” Awareness of mortality keeps us fully alive, such as N. Scott Momaday’s injunction in “To an Aged Bear”: “… Mortality / Is your shadow and your shade. / Translate yourself to spirit; / Be present on your journey.”

In Louis Simpson’s poem “Grand Forks,” an old woman takes a course in writing: “In this place it is clear that the word / is with us, and nowhere else.” In Lasting, the poets’ words are with us, keeping us here while we are here.

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Whether or not you are brave enough to offer this collection as a gift to your aging relatives or friends as Meg did with her father, this National Poetry Month, you can treat yourself to a collection of stirring, satisfying poetry. Or you may wish to alert those in generations below you about your interest in receiving the book as a Mother’s Day or Father’s Day gift.

Of course you can get the book on Amazon or ask your local independent bookseller to order the book. But you can also support the press by ordering Lasting: Poems on Aging directly from Pima Press, send check or money order (payable to Pima Community College Foundation):

Meg Files
Pima Community College
2202 W. Anklam Rd.
Tucson AZ 85709-0170

Cost: $18 (plus $3 for shipping and handling)
Take $2 off each book for orders of 3 or more (plus $5 for shipping and handling)