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Reviewed by Jon Michael Miller for Readers' Favorite
In her prologue to What Love Leaves Behind, Karen A. Hansen writes that her poems are not perfect. But I beg to differ. True, not all twenty-eight are perfectly rhymed, not all perfectly metered. But each one captures the kind of grief and devotion we feel at the loss of a dear one, in this case, her dad. I certainly hope his spirit lives on somewhere where he will sense the emotions and the clear vision his daughter expresses here. In her epilogue, she states that she wrote this book as a kind of therapy to deal with her grief. She created a masterpiece combining deeply moving verse exquisitely augmented by poignant photographs and by backgrounds of textured paper. She structures the presentation in four sections representing distinct stages of grief, with seven poems in each section, only a few poems more than a page long. The language is brilliantly clear, no “poetic” ambiguity, simple word choice, impossible not to understand. Yet the poems are of literary quality and depth, not nursery rhymes.
But reader beware—I advise you to have a box of tissues nearby, and a full one at that. I highly recommend this extraordinarily superb collection to any new or about-to-be father as a lesson in fatherhood, because more than expressing her grief, Karen A. Hansen shows what a good father is and what he does. Someone who is always there for his family, someone who teaches and guides. Her dad emerges from these pages as a paragon of fatherhood, and in the end, she expresses a faith in meeting up in future times. Yes, I shed some tears, but these poems also inspired me, and gave me hope that death is not the end. The poems in What Love Leaves Behind extend far beyond a daughter and a dad; it will give any reader a deep appreciation of family and the inspiration that separation from our loved ones is never permanent.
