Meg Hamill

In lieu of flowers, Meg Hamill offers us a complex essay on the consequences of the Iraq War—and by extension, of all other wars—in poetic form. Hamill recognizes early on that the task she has set before herself of recording a written monument for each of the war’s dead is overreaching: “I can’t write that many obituaries, though I’m beginning to understand why I must” (7).

In stark prose poems formatted to mirror newspaper obituaries, Hamill records loss on both sides of the conflict. Of a potential insurgent, she asks, “was he one of the good ones or the bad ones […] The missile that killed him now in pieces over there in lieu of flowers” (9). On the death of a coalition soldier from Jesup, GA, Hamill questions her own complicity in the conflict: “dominic you signed up for killing and yet you were killed you were guilty and yet holding on to your rabbit ear were you any more guilty than me dominic” (12).

Interspersed between these obituaries, Hamill deftly shifts our gaze to her personal responses to the war written in standard free verse format and italicized appropriated sound bytes culled from news sources. The shift in form reflects the movement of our gaze, forcing us to approach the war from multiple angles, creating a humanizing effect while at the same time bolstering her overall argument. It is hard to read “soldiers would mention some english names of stars of football players and request us to remember them or we would be beaten severely” and not think of prisoner torture (40). Likewise, lines like “what does it mean to lose courage/ if we are hurtling through space like this anyway/ where would the courage go if it was lost” encourage us to continue through this necessary reflection without fear (52).

Hamill urges the reader not to “kick the bodies underneath the table that are gathering between us without noticing without taking note of their limpness their inability to hold onto each other their inability to pray or to breathe” (55). Death Notices is at times an uncomfortable read filled with precise, accurate, disturbing details (the kind we aren’t seeing on television). She asks us to look, to take a good look, because “healing begins at the moment when we learn to sustain our gaze on all the bad and all the stunning things just keep our eyes looking past the time when we want to stop looking” (61).

-David Horton