Pitt Teaching Professor Jeff Oaks’ most recent book, The Things (Lily Poetry Review Books, 2022), is an exploration of grief. That sounds like a cliché to say, but when I say that Jeff Oaks explores grief, I mean it more like the way that somebody explores a labyrinth.
The Things takes you on a long, meandering journey through the experience of mourning, letting you off at various points along the way to simply ponder, to simply sit in the physicality of the experience and understand that there is no escape from the here and the now. Oaks demonstrates an intimate earnestness, a complete and inextricable familiarity both with death and with life that only a seasoned soul can offer, presenting it in such a way that only a true expert in verse can do.
Oaks has been teaching at Pitt since 1987, and in that time has become both a teaching professor at the University and director of undergraduate studies for the Writing program. In our Spring 2021 issue, we interviewed him on his painting endeavors and his first full-length collection Little What—the cover of which, like the cover of The Things, features his original painting.
The Things tells the story of the loss of a mother, beginning even before her death and ending not quite at the beginning, but not quite somewhere else, either. It tells the story of what we carry with us after somebody’s death, whether we carry physical objects or tiny experiences, whether they’re holdovers from the person’s life or from the mourning process itself.
By nature, the collection of poems doesn’t function so much as a straightforward narrative but, rather, as a catalogue, a collection of the in-betweens and the realities that don’t often fit into the artistic perception of death. The Things takes the reader on a tour of those in-betweens, in much the same way that the speaker’s mother wills out her belongings in the book’s titular poem.
We walk among her things, my mother pointing
to That? How about this? Frankly I nod
at everything; I’ll take even the gesture
she makes, straight index finger, the middle, ring,
the little fingers curled under. If I could.
It’s moving, to be sure—that last line, in particular, really showcases the stark and small moments that stand out so clearly in the mind in moments of grief. The overall collection is a mirror of this, it seems: a walk through a house riddled with the things we keep from those we’ve lost.
—Rebecca Reese
Rebecca Reese, T5F communiations intern in the Fall 2022 term, is a senior Writing (fiction) student with a minor in English Literature and a certificate in Television and Broadcasting Arts.