Cottrell, Lawrence: Fractions of the Muse

Dos Madres Press, paperback

Publication Date: April 1, 2024

Publisher Marketing: Fractions of the Muse presents itself as a eulogy, offering "analecta" or excerpts of the poet's late wife's love, her virtues, and her life. Their memory is represented as offering the bereaved husband some consolation, especially in recalling that she had "known joy" in life, "when time was hers to braid." Cottrell's collection is at its heart, though, a lament, compelling and original. Unsure of how to face a future without his dearest companion, the poet recounts his sorrow in terms of how even the most quotidian things appear different in her absence. In this collection, to a greater extent than in some of his earlier work, Cottrell couches his feelings in elevated, often archaic diction, creating a prosody that casts his grief outside the ordinary and yet reminds us of the universality of loss—reminiscent, in this way, of the community of sorrow that all classic elegiac poetry creates. Despite such consolations as the memory of his loved one's blowing a kiss to him when she was dying, the deepest consolations of this collection are in this aura of timelessness and in the music of the poet's phrasing, music that threads through even his bleakest passages. —EDWINA PENDARVIS In Fractions of the Muse Larry Cottrell lifts his distinct and compelling poetic voice in a lamentation; an elegiac collection of poems written around the loss of a beloved friend, companion, lover, life partner. Cottrell mourns deeply, and his sorrow is palpable but never hopeless. In the poem remembering the date of death, he says in a remarkable insight, "For God, who in His blindness dreamt of us, awaits the poet's hand…". The poet's hand is his, and he uses it skillfully to negotiate the dark and treacherous path between grief and despair. A beautiful and beautifully written tribute. —KIRK JUDD