The 72 short pieces that make up B.C. poet Kristjana Gunnars’ Exiles Among You form an extended meditation or book of days, an étude on the nature of grief: “how every day we/say goodbye to parts of our lives.” They are a reconciliation with the fact of the death of a loved one, Gunnars’ mother, to whose memory the book is dedicated. Rather than approaching grief by exhuming nostalgia, by providing us with anecdotal life notes about the lost one, Gunnars creates for us a moving testament in the present tense, a kind of reckoning-up with what is most elemental in a life – sky, birds, plants, the sea. In the linked parts of this book-length poem, Gunnars records not a world crowded with objects, but more and more cleansed of them, or cleansed of attachment to them. This cleansing enriches the channels of hope and memory.

Even the style is spare and refuses adornment, existing rather at some liminal place at the edge of sea and forest, its lines not populated by “characters” and not formed by struggles for power. The suppleness of Gunnars’ recent prose works, her limpid and haunting style from The Prowler and Zero Hour, is here looped back into her poetry, and this suppleness alleviates what could be (but is not) a starkness in Gunnars’ poetic form (though I have no quarrel with starkness).

The book gives us the “large gifts” of sea, sky, plants, and enacts for its readers the slow ebb of “letting go” of the life of a loved one, the ebb and fissure in the heart and body that extend outward into the world, the natural world, and that finally heal by drawing us back in to the world.

Who are the exiles? Who is this “You” the exiles are among? What is “presence”? “memory”? From one viewpoint, the mother is now exiled in the daughter; the dead exiled in the living who knew them. From another angle, the daughter is exiled among the “many” (the “You”) by the death of the mother, by her absence. In each case, death calls everything into question; death makes us reconsider the self, its fragility, its ability to keep speaking, in and among the greatest strangeness.

Gunnars’ book is a quiet accomplishment, a pause in a fractious era, a breath, a look inside a private world that is also a trembling world, and at the same time a look away, to where we are not yet, but to where we will all go, even as “the earth carries on with its multitudes.”