on The Poetry of Suicide

Re-reading

‘Maybe every life disperses itself, never to be regathered or read whole. Poems and other scraps of language are just another thing we pick up where someone leaves them, making of them what we will.’ It is in this space surrounded by ‘poems and scraps of language’ where we find J.T. Welsch in his most recent book of criticism – although the book complicates any standard ideas of the genre through its combination of literary history and memoir. As this passage suggests, there is rightly no attempt at making things whole in this book. I think Francesca Bratton has it exactly right when she describes the book as ‘a kind of manifesto against closure’.

Personally, I felt a certain hesitancy in summarizing or describing the book. This is in part due to the high sense of care the author takes around the language of suicide himself. This includes both his own word choices and those of others writing in the wider academic discipline of suicidology. Among these is the last book written specifically on poetry and suicide, The Savage God by Al Alvarez (1972). The gap in publication between these two books alone confirms the necessity of this project.

I first encountered Welsch’s work at the 3rd Contemporary British and Irish Poetry Conference at the University of Manchester in 2013. His paper ‘The Generation Game: Cohort-Making in Contemporary British Poetry’ made a lasting impression. There was something about the way his work attempted to maintain critical distance from the object of ...