Undoing Knots: a review of Gail Hosking’s ADIEU by Janet Dale

Adieu
By Gail Hosking
Main Street Rag (February 2024)
40 pp.

“Union’s history is life’s archive: invisible

ink written on bodies. A story of sky

and leaf changing.” 

--from “Wife Writes Husband a Final Letter”

In her second collection from Main Street Rag, Gail Hosking takes the reader on a journey through the dissolution of a marriage told through twenty-five finely crafted poems.

Mostly from the perspective of a “wife,” each of these poems captures the nuances of unraveling romantic love set in a domestic emotional landscape. Although it has been revealed that the work chronicles the poet’s own experience, these poems should resonate with anyone who has formed memories both with and after a partner is gone.

As someone who usually likes to skip around in a book of poems, the pacing and ordering really works here to push the reader forward. I found myself pausing between stanzas and pages, but never wanting to break the constructed narrative.

There is breathing room along this journey for us to relive memories “stored for some upcoming storm” (“Sixth Sense”) ranging from “nights in Mexico,” “cancer caught early,” and “blessed hours shared in the library” (“It Had To Do With Being Lucky”) all the way up to being in the room as a couple signs divorce papers “…twenty minutes of signatures / in the lawyer’s office put final punctuation / on the two of us as one” (“Two Republics Again”).

I was surprised to discover a found poem (“A Divorcee’s Side of the Story”) just a few pages away from the end, because it didn’t interrupt the overall mood of the collection. The words borrowed from A Muse and A Maze, a 2014 book by Peter Turchi that compares writing and puzzle making, fits in (pun unintended) very well.   

In the title poem (“Adieu”) which closes the book, the speaker navigates saying goodbye by not dwelling on the past but letting go of “the knots we’ve tied” instead. Despite the sorrow and challenges, there is both acceptance and a moving forward which leaves the reader with a quiet resolution just as they reach the back cover.

Janet Dale lives in southeast Georgia where she teaches for the Department of English at Georgia Southern University. Nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net, she is the author of the chapbook Ghosts Passing Through from Alien Buddha Press. Her work has appeared in Atticus Review, The Boiler, Zone 3, and others.