Eloquent and accessible poems commemorating the “stunning blast” of loss

When Sam Ray was killed at nineteen in an accident, his father began writing poetry dedicated to his memory. Sam’s Book is a collection of these elegies and other poems written during Sam’s lifetime. “How should I mourn?” David Ray asks. By recalling poignant events from the past he transcends his grief. He remembers Sam’s first bath, a “holy/Rite”; tying the shoelaces of the “little man”; traveling to Greece, where Sam is “the first…/to see the holy moon.” With painful wit and regret he summons up the image of his son’s blue Toyota, fastidiously transformed by Sam and his girlfriend into a “love nest.” Ray muses on what he taught Sam and what Sam taught him. Originally published in 1987, Sam’s Book won the 1988 Maurice English Poetry Award.

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Reviews:

“I admire Ray's honesty and directness, but that he should also be able to make poems out of his grief...is a tribute to the steely-nerved artist in him... I will stand out among books of contemporary poetry.”—Roger Mitchell, Prairie Schooner

Endorsements:

“A very original book. It is a book of love poems—of that there is no doubt—and yet these are father and son love poems. I don’t know of any other book in American literature like it.”—Robert Bly

From the Book:

“The Question”

How long should I mourn?
Let me ask you, my son.
How long would you wish it?
Do you want it to go on?
Is there anything to be gained
for either of us, for both of us?
Are you so far away now
that you’re no more than a wish,
the one I had on my mind
before you fulfilled it, came
quite early one morning
when mist was on fields
and we had slept there, waiting
in a tent for you, yet rushed
into the town, as if
a boy like you could not
have appeared out of the fields,
blue mists not far from the ocean.