What Does Not Return
What Does Not Return examines dementia and caregiving against the expansive backdrop of the rural inland West. Through a process of loss and letting go, the poems turn away from "what cannot be undone" in favor of what the present moment reveals through dreams, art, and encounters with animals.
From the Back Cover:
Tami Haaland's exquisite and necessary book of poems, What Does Not Return, is a rare account of the experience we have come to call, rightly, care-giving. With ritual attentiveness, in small, deeply considered gestures, in words exchanged at the altar of grief, she shows us what it might mean to honor and celebrate what is given to us and what is taken away. From the moving first poems, in which she witnesses her mother's daily diminishment and eventual death from dementia, to the last, when she finds herself searching silently for an escaped rabbit in the night, these poems remind us that, if we are here, we are all "graveside," sitting "on the edge, legs dangling." We are here on the verge of tears, where the daylight is.
- Melissa Kwasny
What Does Not Return is remarkable--pity and common joy intermingling. The ceremony of language that poetry is carries throughout the book. We hear a lift in the writer's sentences and deft handling of pace in every poem. We see the entrance of light and the light that remains after the poem is finished, a mother's life put away. Our life's story is told, the end especially, with grave dignity. And, as it is with ceremonies, a sense of what is pure also remains, a sense that we are "awake in ways" that we "couldn't have sustained earlier."
- Carol Frost
University of Washington Press (March 1, 2018)