Selah - 9781771314459

A long poem that limns the incremental mourning of living with a person who has frontotemporal dementia.

Selah, from Psalms and Habakkuk — to praise, to lift up, to weigh in the balances, to pause, or a purely musical notation. Biblical scholars debate the exact meaning. Selah, Nora Gould's second poetry collection, is a sequence of fragments written in dialogue with all of these meanings. Stitched together, these fragments form a poem that runs from the ranch land of Alberta into the heart of a shared house and a shared life.

Selah is about living with a husband recently diagnosed with dementia; it's about the looking back and the imagining forward, about saying what cannot be said—the wayfaring bush and its shadow. It's about finding a way through all this: "The palette darker than I'd planned," yes, but also shot through with humour and care, crafted with both frankness and decorum.

In her award-winning previous book, I see my love more clearly from a distance, Gould wrote, "When Zoë finishes high school / I'll be on this horse of marriage as if riding after freezing rain: / muscles tensed to lift me in the saddle." In many ways this book is that ride. It pares away anything that does not immediately, albeit subtly, get to the aching muscle of the matter.