Days of Grace and Silence: A Chronicle of Covid’s Long Haul by Ann E. Wallace
Kelsay Books, 2024
Ann E. Wallace’s poetry collection, Days of Grace and Silence: A Chronicle of Covid’s Long Haul, is a lush and moving take on the Covid pandemic. The poems accumulate to tell a story, spanning spring of 2020 to spring of 2023, that is both shared and private. As the pandemic and the lockdowns descend nationwide, Wallace takes to her pantry and garden, gathering her family around to nest and protect one another. Soon enough, though, Wallace herself, and then each of her two daughters come down with the virus, and so begins the particulars of her own private journey as both patient and caretaker, individual and member of the human race, as the poems spool out to give a picture of the personal and the universal experience of the pandemic.
Wallace’s poetry spans many worlds: that of teacher, mother, patient, caretaker, nature lover, and wife of a funeral director. Her precision and restraint act on readers to help them remember their own experiences of the pandemic while making sense of those experiences as we are only able to do in retrospect. She exhorts her students, holds the hands of the dead as she helps her husband ready them for burial, and feeds the finches in her backyard. Her scope is both wide (taking in the larger human experience) and narrow, as she describes her own footsteps.
Wallace has been a patient for 30 years (she is the survivor of ovarian cancer who also has multiple sclerosis and continues to cope with the long-haul effects of Covid), yet she never descends into self-pity or despair, instead choosing to try to convey her embodied experience of what we all lived through. Never on the verge of giving up, we feel her impulse to live as she struggles to put one foot in front of the other as she trudges through the pandemic, recommitting to her life daily as it morphs, surprises, disappoints, and sometimes worse.
Wallace writes in “For the House Finches: April 1, 2020,” “I wonder if the house finches know / they own the yard this year.” It is as though, as she slides onto her couch succumbing to her own serious case of the virus, she is giving over her world to nature. Never throwing her arms up as if to say, “Why me?” and never losing hope, Wallace instead takes our hand and leads us on a journey of remembrance for all that we’ve been through. The finches may have the yard for this year, she seems to imply, but she’ll be back amongst them. Such is her unspoken promise to them and to us.
Wallace has masterfully crafted a scrapbook of sorts that reminds us of what we went through during that year of lockdown. In “Math Problem,” I was reminded that, “At the start of April, a body would be held / a cold two weeks to be cremated in New York City. / Which means a family would wait those 14 burning / days for an end to the start of a nightmare.” Yes, I think, I remember learning that too. We all walked that path after all, and the poetry provides the solace of remembrance, revisiting that time through the lens of Wallace’s poetry. We may have been isolated from one another, but we certainly were not alone.
In “My Facebook Feed Tells Me,” Wallace makes a sly nod to the cultural trends we shared during lockdown: “…milkweed and butterflies / are this year’s sourdough bread.” Yes! There is both a frison of discovery and the warmth of shared memories in these pages, a kind of validation of what it is we all went through.
Her quiet compassion is immense. In “To My Students in the Time of the Novel Coronavirus,” she writes, “I know you are struggling, and, though I will / not tell you this, I know you will continue / to struggle. So much has shattered.” Wallace understands that those in her charge, students, neighbors, children, are slowly sliding into catastrophe.
Toward the end of the collection, “August Sun: Summer 2021” brings us back to the natural world of the beginning: “I have watched the cherry tree / in my yard burst into pink, / the finches and robins return / to peck for seeds in the blooming / spit of green outside my window.” The cycle of the seasons lurches on despite the calamity of the world, with or without humans.
The collection ends, unsurprisingly given Wallace’s enormous capacity for optimism, with “The Infinity of Hope.” In it Wallace writes, “So tell me, what small ripples / will you release into the world / today on faith that you may not see / what stuck things they loosen?” By speaking to us directly in this way, she invites us to participate in the healing of the world as we move forward and away from the pandemic, despite the ways it may have permanently changed us.
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N. West Moss is a graduate of Columbia University’s Narrative Medicine CPA Program and is the author of a memoir (Flesh and Blood, from Algonquin), a short story collection (The Subway Stops at Bryant Park, from Leapfrog), and a forthcoming novel (Birdy, from Little, Brown). Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Salon, McSweeney’s, The Saturday Evening Post, and elsewhere.