First published (in hardcover): 2010.

Includes bibliographical references (pages 293-305) and index.

Part 1: Reckoning -- Between grief and nothing, I will take grief -- Musee des Beaux Arts / W H Auden -- Dying / Robert Pinsky -- Wake / Rita Dove -- After great pain, a formal feeling comes -- My life closed twice before its close -- / Emily Dickinson -- Secret knowledge -- Much hurrying / Brenda Hillman -- Race / Sharon Olds -- Whale / Terrance Hayes -- Silence / D H Lawrence -- Futility / Wilfred Owen -- Lament / Anne Sexton -- Not waving but drowning / Stevie Smith -- Do not go gentle into that good night / Dylan Thomas -- Pyrrhic victory / Lucie Brock-Broido -- Mower / Philip Larkin -- No more / Mary Jo Bang -- Loss / Ruth Stone -- Ever / Brenda Shaughnessy -- Sudden / Nick Flynn -- Do not pick up the telephone / Ted Hughes -- Funeral blues / W H Auden -- Graveyard blues / Natasha Trethewey -- Without / Donald Hall -- For a woman dead at thirty / Jean Valentine -- Final Notations / Adrienne Rich -- One continuous substance / Albert Goldbarth -- Iron / Jane Cooper -- Bereavement / Kevin Young -- This hour and what is dead / Li-Young Lee -- Carrion comfort / Gerard Manley Hopkins -- From choir practice / Forrest Hamer -- To Bhain Campbell -- Epilogue / John Berryman -- Sea canes / Derek Walcott -- Autumn passage / Elizabeth Alexander -- Let evening come / Jane Kenyon -- Part 2: Regret -- I believe, but what is belief? -- Nothing gold can stay / Robert Frost -- Spots / Joel Brouwer -- Like / Frank Bidart -- Dreaming of the dead / Anne Stevenson -- Grief / Stephen Dobyns -- Elegy for Jane / Theodore Roethke -- On the death of friends in childhood / Donald Justice -- Shout / Simon Armitage -- We assume: on the death of our son, Reuben Masai Harper / Michael S Harper -- Written on the due date of a son never born / David Wojahn -- Stillbirth / Laure-Anne Bosselaar -- Mid-term break / Seamus Heaney -- Litany / Gregory Orr -- How some of it happened / Marie Howe -- Freedom, New Hampshire / Galway Kinnell -- Ice / Mary Oliver -- Last hellos / Les Murray -- Oh antic God / Lucille Clifton -- Speaking to my dead mother / Ruth Stone -- Reassurance / Thom Gunn -- My sister, who died young, takes up the task / Jon Pineda -- Elegy for my father / Mark Strand -- Men at my father's funeral / William Matthews -- On the death of a colleague / Stephen Dunn -- Marquee moon / Jeff Fallis -- Facts of grief / Jim Daniels -- David Lemieux / Denise Duhamel -- Dirge without music / Edna St Vincent Millay.

Part 3: Remembrance -- What did I know, what did I know -- After / Elizabeth Alexander -- Poems for my brother Kenneth / Owen Dodson -- Artifact / Claudia Emerson -- Remember me / Hal Sirowitz -- Death is a woman / Joy Harjo -- Tiara / Mark Doty -- Memorial: son Bret / William Stafford -- Morning baking / Carolyn Forche -- Hand me down blues / Calvin Forbes -- Grief / C K Williams -- Myth / Natasha Trethewey -- Bones of my father / Etheridge Knight -- Song / Joseph Brodsky -- Those winter Sundays / Robert Hayden -- Asked for a happy memory of her father, she recalls Wrigley Field / Beth Ann Fennelly -- Forgiving my father / Lucille Clifton -- White crane / Dean Young -- Elegy / Arnold J Kemp -- Cosmos, late blooming / D A Powell -- Abiku / Afaa Michael Weaver -- Lost pilot / James Tate -- Refusal to mourn the death, by fire, of a child in London / Dylan Thomas -- Luke and the duct tape / Coleman Barks -- Birthday poem / Erin Murphy -- You don't miss your water / Cornelius Eady -- Dead / Billy Collins -- Part 4: Ritual -- Tomorrow, the bowl I have yet to fill -- Water / Philip Larkin -- My religion / Anne Carson -- Truth the dead know / Anne Sexton -- Listen Lord: a prayer / James Weldon Johnson -- Dedication for a plot of ground / William Carlos Williams -- Facing it / Yusef Komunyakaa -- Funeral rites / Seamus Heaney -- Not forgotten / Toi Derricotte -- After your death / Natasha Trethewey -- Disposal / W D Snodgrass -- Seersucker suit / Deborah Digges -- Until she returns / Reginald Shepherd -- Oboe in Handel's largo from Xerxes as elegy / Quan Barry -- Transaction / A R Ammons -- My father's body / William Matthews -- My mother's body, my professor, my bower / Jean Valentine -- Dead letters / Mary Jo Salter -- I needed to talk to my sister / Grace Paley -- Fatal April / Thomas Sayers Ellis -- Celestial music / Louise Gluck -- God / Michael Ryan -- Trying to pray / James Wright -- Ice storm / Robert Hayden -- Wasteful gesture only not / Tony Hoagland -- Blues procession / Terrance Hayes -- I just wanna testify / Cornelius Eady -- Incensation at the funeral / Matthew Rohrer -- My father's funeral / Karl Shapiro -- Cold calls / Edward Hirsch -- Burial [no woman no cry] / Kevin Young -- Mourners / Ted Kooser -- Lament / Louise Gluck -- Request / Lawrence Raab -- Elegy / Meghan O'Rourke -- Translation / Franz Wright -- Storm valediction / Campbell McGrath -- One art / Elizabeth Bishop -- Prayer / Galway Kinnell -- Part 5: Recovery -- I learn by going where I have to go -- My heart / Frank O'Hara -- Poem / Simon Armitage -- Gilded shadow / Jane Mayhall -- On new terms / Deborah Garrison -- For the anniversary of my death / W S Merwin -- Hum / Ann Lauterbach -- Try to praise the mutilated world translated by Clare Cavanagh / Adam Zagajewski -- Grief / Matthew Dickman -- My father, in heaven, is reading out loud / Li-Young Lee -- Vigil / Phillis Levin -- Practice / Ellen Bryant Voigt -- Re: happiness, in pursuit thereof / C D Wright -- Light turnouts / John Ashbery -- Living alone (II) / Denise Levertov -- Beach roses / Mark Doty -- Death poem / Kim Addonizio -- Infirm / Gwendolyn Brooks -- It is what it is / Paul Muldoon -- 12/19/02 -- David Leham -- Weeds and peonies / Donald Hall -- Lilacs / Richard Wilbur -- Father / Ted Kooser -- After my death / David Young -- Lucky life / Gerald Stern -- Wait / Galway Kinnell -- Wild geese / Mary Oliver -- Waking / Theodore Roethke.

Part 6: Redemption -- What will survive of us in love -- Trees / Philip Larkin -- In the city of light / Larry Levis -- Death shall have no Dominion / Dylan Thomas -- What are years? / Marianne Moore -- First Psalm / Anne Sexton -- Evening / Charles Simic -- Grasses translated by Coleman Barks / Rumi -- Redemption song / Kevin Young -- From the Clay Hill anthology / Hayden Carruth -- When death comes / Mary Oliver -- I thank you God for most this amazing / E E Cummings -- Unsolicited survey / Phillis Levin -- Yet the books translated by Czeslaw Milosz and Robert Hass / Czeslaw Milosz -- Last words / James Merrill -- Music is in the piano only when it is played / Jack Gilbert -- Coda / Jason Shinder -- Litany / Aracelis Girmay -- Notes from the other side / Jane Kenyon -- Self-portrait / Charles Wright -- Mother / Anne Stevenson -- Did this ever happen to you / Franz Wright -- Arundel tomb / Philip Larkin -- Poem for a survivor / Donald Justice -- Letter from God / Ruth L Schwartz -- Otherwise / Jane Kenyon -- To breath / Kenneth Koch -- Train ride / Ruth Stone -- Acknowledgments -- Index by subject.