Guernica Editions

The Bones of His Being is a tender and deeply moving memorial to the life and to the slow, partly self-willed dying, of a much-loved father and husband. These haunting poems deal with depression and joy, with the perception of beauty, and with the pain of loss; they are, profoundly, about love.

On a simple level, The Bones of His Being is made up of spare, beautiful poems about a father's death: "the weight and shape and rasp" of letting go. But the book is also about silence, the particular silence of a man who decided to die no matter how loved he was by his family. Chenette masters her grief with grace to tell the story candidly and intimately. She and the poems go further than their eloquence; they become a shirt, a talisman, a favourite song; they add up to an extraordinary loss. Even at its most heartbreaking moments, there is a "small painful hope" at the core of this book, a desire and a resolution to understand the truth.