Berryman’s 1956 poem speaks both to and with Bradstreet, giving voice to the shocks and despairs and ambushing joys of 17th-century domestic life.

This issue is ready for your consumption, when all of us need something good to read, when truth and beauty are, in my opinion, the most effective antidote to the Coronavirus Task Force briefings and the foggy lack of concentration we’re all suffering from—“viral time,” it’s been dubbed—this slowed state in which we shelter in place while being inundated at the greatest possible speed with crisis-level amounts of life-or-death information.

In an era before mass-production, every object a person handled was made by an individual, and thus unique. It had a history, and, sometimes, a destiny. Chairs, weapons, embroidered cloaks, a bronze cheese grater—any of these might appear in Homer with the name of its maker, its place of origin, and the genealogy of who regifted it to whom.

Shaking Teddy’s hand, he knows this week will be long and filled with lasts: Last swim in the lake. Last game of horseshoes on the lawn. Last night on the dock, watching the moon climb, star by star, into the sky.

He will pay for this at Trivia Night if he makes it to the future

(If the future still has trivia, if the future still has night)

and my friend is feeling better, done with chemo,
and I don’t know what to say but can’t shut up,
just keep reloading wrong words through the last
packed aisles and turnstiles, back to Saturday,
appalled, of course, but not ungratified
by all these ways we have to stay alive.

Integration in, say, Germany, with its robust manufacturing economy and a need for workers is one thing. In Greece, which is just beginning to recover from its worst ever recession and still has statistical unemployment of 16 percent, it is quite another.

Here, I thought, is a glimpse of what it’s like to live without evidence of the past

Maybe I’m missing something. Death in Her Hands is a novel about delusions and lacunae, after all, and it’s certainly possible that I’m not as careful a reader as I think I am, but I’ve read this book twice now, and I still don’t have a clear sense of why it was written, much less of what it’s trying to say.

And she could see, at last, that the origins of this experience had been lived by and passed down through so many others whose names she would not recognize, whose wisdom she could not catch.

There is no form for what I have become,
                         Half-widowèd
            So long before my widowhead: