"Ex gratia" by Andreas Gripp

Cover photo for Ex gratia

Poet Andreas Gripp has recently sent me his latest chapbook, ex gratia a book Gripp enjoins us to read as a sequence of poems. It's no surprise to me—acquainted as I've become, over the past several years, with his style, temperament & sensibilities—that any selection can give the poetic effect of a whole work just as easily as if it were read on its own. I think the wonderful interplay of lyricism and language evident in Gripp's poetry in general can't but tie the particular piece to a single pervading tone. And the tone is a distinctively mournful one from beginning to end.

ex gratia is a book of love, loss and mourning but particularly, as its title suggests, a love given without qualification, perhaps the most tragic of all. Love is lost at the very start, shadowed by a dead rival and inconsolable grief. Since he's continually faced with both the poet-narrator, in troubadour fashion, resorts to evoking poetic figures, images of a calming nature and dirge-like refrains of "letting go" ("Ex gratia") as a means of keeping a relationship alive. To encounter them in Gripp's chapbook comprises the chief reading pleasure.

On your couch,
hearing the din
of the summer storm,
my hand makes a move to yours
during the scores of overlapping
rumbles,

and it flinches, yours does,

not from the sound
of the thunder,
but by the sight of four
of my fingers
subtly stretching, contending
for your contact,

and your reflex is speedier
than the lightning strikes
outside,

your words just as burning,

I can't, I'm sorry,
I won't,

his hands only... (from "The Comforting, or the attempt at such")

Water, the garden soil, flowers, time of year are each a sort of symbolic cross erected by poet at each stage of their brief three-year journey. The Charing Cross analogy is not fanciful: there's something particularly solemn and graceful here, something befitting a nobility of artistic temperament that leaves lyrical traces to the grieving heart. If Edward's grief was for a real Eleanor of Castile, the poet's is rather for a love that, even when taken away from him, gives him only more whispering denials.

And of her, the one I met
in the Spring,
the one who accompanies
my comings and goings
from this godless, pitiful place,

I think she whispers something,
about feeling, how she feels,
and I'm unable to hear it,
to bear it, any of it,
my half-there reply,

not now, I'm sorry,
not yet. (from "The World Revolved and We Felt It Not")

A kind thank you to my friend Andreas Gripp for a lyricism of love's unfeeling wheel never retold so elegantly and so endearingly.