Category Archives: Grief Recovery

The Silence Teacher is Now Available

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The Silence Teacher by Robert Peake

My short poetry collection The Silence Teacher is now available from Poetry Salzburg. It distills nearly seven years of writing about love and loss into just thirty-two pages, and is dedicated to the memory of our son.

The poems in this collection were written in both America and England. They encompass the two years of my MFA in Writing degree at Pacific University, wherein the encouragement of my mentors Sandra Alcosser, Marvin Bell, and Joseph Millar, alongside many gifted students and friends, helped me to take up William Stafford’s challenge to revise, not only my work, but my life.

Many thanks to Dr. Wolfgang Görtschacher and Andreas Schachermayr, not only for selecting this manuscript, but for working very diligently and efficiently since then to bring it to publication. Pre-orders are now shipping from Austria and, if you have not already, you can order your own copy here.

Lucky Seven

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Seven of HeartsOne month after we opened the final flap on the Advent Calendar, a child was born. Far from the environment of a stable, the operating theatre was brightly lit, clean smelling, and sterilised. Everything had gone just as Science had said it ought to go right up to that moment. Yet when our son emerged, he did not cry. Three days later, he died in my arms.

Perhaps to reassure us, since they knew we wanted to try for another child, the doctors told us that what had happened to us was a one-in-one-thousand occurence in the developed world. In the Euromillions lottery, beating one-in-one-thousand odds will win you about fifteen pounds. What happened to me seven years ago was worth so much more than that.

In the past, I would have defined a miracle as a significant, often inexplicable change in a course of events toward an outcome I had been hoping for. The miracle of James coming into our life, however, turned into something I had never imagined would happen, and something I would not wish on anyone. Yet I still call his birth a miracle, because it transformed me. Continue reading →

2012 Roundup Year-in-Review

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Mayan Stone CarvingsOnce again, I take a look over the past year and select one post from each month that seems significant.

January: Numerology of Grief (The Sixth Year)

This brief meditation on six years since the death of our son found its way to a friend-of-a-friend who also lost his son in infancy. To hear how much it meant to him made all the long silences between writing seem bearable.

February: Long-Listed, National Poetry Competition

So close. Still, having my poem be one of the 130 long-listed poems out of over 11,000 entries was a nice little boost.

March: Magma Poetry Launch Reading at The Troubadour

I was delighted to have a poem appear in Magma, and fell in love with the history and rich atmosphere of The Troubadour that night.

April: First Year in London: Lessons in Negative Capability

Reflecting on lessons learned after one year living in England, I found the advice of John Keats as pertinent to poetry as it was a balm for culture shock.

May: Jonah (Film-Poem by Alastair Cook)

Lens-based artist Alastair Cook did a remarkable job incorporating a poem I wrote in memory of our neighbour-friends’ son into a film-poem in his characteristic visual style.

June: At Home in the English Countryside

Settling in to a different pace of life.

July: In Praise of Small Spaces

Learning to take pleasure in the little cultivations of a simple life.

August: Sabotaged! (A Review)

Martha Sprackland made some deeply insightful observations, the likes of which could only have come from reading closely and thinking carefully about my debut collection Human Shade

September: Ira Lightman: Experiments in Poetry

I came to embrace the high-risk, high-reward art form of experimental poetry.

November: Silk Road British Poetry Feature

After months of poem-wrangling and poem-wrestling, I completed my special feature on British poetry for Silk Road Review, due out in print next summer.

December: The Power and Peril of Written Words

Raw from the Newtown shootings, I typed out some thoughts on America’s reverence for the Second Amendment. It was re-syndicated by Huffington Post and ended up making the front page. Thousands of reads and hundreds of comments later, I only hope we might come a little closer to preventing such tragedies in the future.

“Toy Soldiers, Real Guns” on The Good Men Project

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Toy SoldierThe Good Men Project maintains a strong commitment to publishing work and fostering discussion on difficult subjects relating to gender and masculinity. My thoughts have been developing in conversations (real and virtual) following the Newtown shooting about the nature of violence and what we might do to heal. I am grateful to the editors for publishing my piece “Toy Soldiers, Real Guns” and hope the conversation can lead to more meaningful change.

(photo: puuikibeach / flickr)

The Power and Peril of Written Words

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America, A Prophecy by William BlakeI believe that it is important to intelligently question the modern relevance of our ancestors’ words. It is as important to literature as it is to government. The Second Amendment to the US Constitution was enacted on December 15th, 1791, exactly 221 years ago today.

I currently live in England–a country with no written constitution. Upon discovering this, the American comedian Jon Stewart laughed out loud, insinuating that the British were “too polite” to set their thoughts on government down in a single document. In reality, countless legal documents, and their interpretation, make up the “unwritten constitution”–allowing it to be continually debated, updated, and adapted to the practicalities of modern times by parliament.

After a hard-won Revolutionary War against a British government that restricted freedom of speech and assembly, only permitted firearms to be purchased through them in limited quantities, and also forced Colonists to quarter soldiers without warning, it makes sense that the First, Second, and Third Amendments to the US Constitution were soon passed. The First one has proved vital to a healthy democracy; the Third one seems pretty irrelevant these days.

However, as soon as you suggest that the Second Amendment, and its subsequent interpretation allowing citizens to own firearms for self-defence independent of a militia, might not be well-suited to the Twenty-First Century, you will probably be called “unpatriotic” or even “un-American.” Continue reading →

Sabotaged! (A Review)

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SabotageMartha Sprackland, editor of Cake, took a critical eye to my collection Human Shade in the latest review for Sabotage. She made deeply insightful observations, the likes of which could only have come from reading closely and thinking carefully about the work. For this, I am honoured. And because this collection is so achingly personal, it feels a bit as though she peered into my core.

Here analysis of the imagery, for example, articulates unconscious forces at play during the writing and assembling of the manuscript:

Throughout, Peake manages the subject of his son’s death both dextrously and eloquently. The line ‘I lash my faith to the mast of a boat’ (‘Elegy for the News’) is entirely appropriate for a collection in which the tidelines of grief are oceanic, dynamic, ever-changing, lapping up against the edges of the poems yet crucially avoiding the spill into sentimentality. Indicative of the poet’s skill is the way Peake is able to address his grief; in a poem about his son he is controlled, silent, ‘I disown the alphabet / unsaying each letter’ (‘To Friends Not Knowing What To Say’), whilst a poem about a road sign at the Mexican border is allowed to contain the line about the child ‘who rises as though winged in a blaze of light’ (‘Road Sign on Interstate 5’). The poems are shared, spliced, images from certain pieces belonging to others, yet all coalescing on the child, and all the better for their displacement.

Gratifying, too, is that my struggles against tidy conclusions and the shorthand vocabulary of psychoanalysis seem to have paid off, at least for this reader, who writes, “The collection ends on the promise of hope without the trite self-help conclusion too often found in collections assembled around a death.”

Naturally, there are parts she liked less in the work as a whole, and which I will consider as a writer. Overall, though, it is deeply encouraging to know that someone considering the work this carefully found their attention repaid, and it is a pleasure to read their many discoveries so beautifully phrased.

Read the full review here.

Christopher Reid’s Elegiac Scattering

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“Hobgoblin, nor foul fiend; / nor even the jobsworth slob / with a slow sly scheme to rob / my darling of her mind / that I imagined; / just a tumour.”

-Christopher Reid, “The Unfinished”, from A Scattering

A Scattering by Christopher ReidChristopher Reid’s A Scattering is a moving tribute to his wife Lucinda, who died of cancer. A respected English poet recommended it to me after reading my piece contrasting Douglass Dunn and Donald Hall, both of whom also wrote elegies under very similar circumstances. In addition to fine poems, in this book I also found certain insights into how a culture grieves, and what it considers good art.

Whereas Douglass Dunn’s elegies take root in his working-class background, Reid signals his place in the upper class early on in the book when, on the island of Crete, he invokes “ghosts of old schoolmasters” whose lessons, in his mouth, have become, “scraps of misremembered Classical Greek.”

In The Daily Telegraph, a periodical more typically aligned with those who studied Classics as school, Tom Payne assessed, “It is a collection that defies criticism in two ways–first, because it feels wrong to pick over such poignant elegies, and also, because so many of these poems are impossible to fault.” What makes this book seem flawless to this particular slice of Britain–and especially when the topic is such a difficult one?

Two elements more common in American expressions of grief are entirely off limits to Reid: invoking religious faith, and outpouring emotion. Instead, educated fascination with the world, and particularly the natural world, takes the place of religion; and self-consciousness and self-deprecation take the place of emotive self-expression.
Continue reading →

Jonah (Film-Poem by Alastair Cook)

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Lens-based artist Alastair Cook has done a remarkable job incorporating a poem I wrote in memory of our neighbour-friends’ son into a film-poem in his characteristic visual style. Be sure to listen through headphones to get the full effect of Vladimir Kryutchev‘s binaural recordings. The film will premiere at the Felix Poetry Festival in Antwerp soon.
<a href="https://vimeo.com/42966391">Click here to watch the film</a>.

Numerology of Grief (The Sixth Year)

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“In the depth of winter, I finally learned that within me lay an invincible summer.”

-Albert Camus

Six is my favourite number. It is the number of years between my younger sister and me. It looks like the lovechild of zero and “C”. The only single digit that is divisible by two as well as three, it seems to encompass both even and odd with a swirling, round-bottomed equanimity.

This tadpole, half of a yin-yang symbol, is also the number for idealists. Six years ago today, I counted myself among them when our son was born. I was determined to be the ideal father to an ideal son. Three days, eight hours and forty minutes later, when the doctor pronounced him dead, that idealism shattered, not by twos and threes, but into innumerable pieces.
Continue reading →

2011 Roundup Year-in-Review

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“How can I tell what I think ’till I see what I say?”

-E.M. Forster
Image: Wikipedia

Once again, I have taken a look over the past year, and selected one post from each month that stood out in some way.

January: The Fifth Year

Today, I said goodbye two our two-year-old Australian nephew, not sure when we will see him again. As we near the sixth anniversary of our son’s birth and death, I realise how far we have come, not only geographically, but psychologically as well. Passing the fifth year was a milestone for us.

February: Human Shade

In February, my debut short collection Human Shade was published by Lost Horse Press in America. It was extremely heartening to see so many orders arrive in such a short time. I brought a few copies with me to England.

March: London Calling

In March, we made the decision to move to London. Having lived my entire life in California, I had no idea just what a leap this would be for me.

April: Adieu, America

In April, I said goodbye to America, but not to being an American. In fact, living here, I have never felt so American as I do now. My father also bid me farewell in a very special way.

May: Through the Looking Glass

In May, we arrived with just our suitcases. We had one week to find a place to live before the start of my new job. After the whirlwind subsided, I began to feel like Alice, down the rabbit hole in a world that only superficially resembled the one I had known.

June: Notes on Contemporary British Poetry

In June, I began to take advantage of my circumstances by way of comparative Anglo-American poetics. So began an effort to overcome what I have deemed “poetic culture shock“–and come to understand the subtle differences between British and American poetry.

July: Discovering an Artistic Ancestor

In July, I discovered a remarkable book by another poet named Peake, which had a profound effect on me.

August: The Nature of Peace

In August, the London riots exploded not far from our home while we were on holiday in Wales with my parents. The contrast prompted this meditation.

September: An American Werewolf in London

In September, I began to put my finger on the sense of otherness that had been haunting me, and let myself howl a bit at the moon.

October: “On Being Straight (A Thought Experiment)“

I wrote this piece in October, and within a short span of time my “thought experiment” turning the tables on identity politics had received over 95,000 views on StumbleUpon, and been republished in The Good Men Project.

November: “The Invisible Father“

A colleague’s casual remark set off this mini-essay for The Good Men Project about the being a father without a child.

December: “British Matches“

In December, Aperçus Quarterly published this short poem, inspired by the warning label on a pack of matches. Along with comparative Anglo-American poetics, I seem to be studying semiotic estrangement–the effect of “everyday” signs and symbols on a cultural outsider.

It has been a remarkable year. Wishing peace to you and yours in 2012!

The Invisible Father

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I am pleased to have the following piece appear in The Good Men Project online:

In response to the recent news that my wife’s health condition had worsened, a coworker kindly offered to babysit. “You must have mistaken me for someone else in the office,” I replied, “We don’t have kids.” Being a considerate person, I expected her to respond to my email as others had before–with apologies, saying she meant no offense. But the next part of her message took me by surprise. She said something to the effect that I seemed grounded and settled, and that this is a quality she often admires in dads.

As a child, I always thought invisibility was the best possible super power. To be able to see and know what is going on, without being seen yourself, was something I craved. So much so that I still am taken aback when others share insights about me that they have gained from observation. But the idea that I was behaving in a visibly father-like way struck me as both poignant and profound.

The death of our infant son, and our subsequent inability to have another child, cast me into not only grief, but a longing to understand what my life is about.

Continue reading the full article online at The Good Men Project…