Poetry review – LETTERS FOR JOHN: Alex Josephy is moved by the memories Carole Coates continues to share with her late husband
Letters for John
Carole Coates
Bowstring Poetry
ISBN: 78-1-0676729-0-3
25 pages £8
Letters for John follows in the footsteps of Carole Coates’ previous collections, When the Swimming Pool Fell in the Sea and Dead Letters. Together they form an extended elegy for Coates’ husband, John, who died suddenly in 2020; an impressively sustained illustration of constancy. The poems also constitute a validation of the written word’s power, beyond consoling and bearing witness; as in classic poetry, they seem to me to strive for a particularly literary kind of immortality, while fully acknowledging our essential physical mortality. I’m thinking of course of Shakespeare’s sonnets, for instance sonnet 81:
You still shall live, such virtue hath my pen,
Where breath most breathes, even in the mouths of men.
In this new collection Coates stays with letter form, each three stanza poem numbered (i to xxv), addressed to ‘Dear J’ and signed off ‘Yours ever, C’, each with a brief PS, usually locating the poem’s feet firmly on the ground, however far it has travelled. The form frames them as an on-going one-sided conversation, continued over six years; poignant and often funny memories create the impression of John’s abiding presence. It’s like reading a grief journal, but much enlivened by the poet’s questions, comments and entreaties. The pain of adapting to a life alone remains sharp; after a difficult hospital appointment she complains: “You may have the best of excuses, love, / but you’re still not here when I need you.”
At other moments the poet discusses current interesting events and ideas as she would have done when John was actually present:
What are ‘lies’ now that each person wears his own ‘truth’
like a balaclava, cosy among realities, all self-chosen?
Did you foresee this when you leapt up so angrily
in that public lecture — where was it?— a London college?
In the poem ‘Letters for John (v)’, Coates mentions and wittily dismisses standard grief theories:
I’ve been reading books on ‘Grief’ — they don’t hurt me now,
much. Bewilder rather. Neat stages, maps, the progress
of loss, tick lists, tidy lineup, this then that, a linear
movement of the heart.
However she does trace her progress in enduring heartbreaking loss over time. She compares it to holding a ‘fire stone’. In one poem, a group of bereaved people react differently to what they have to ‘hold’:
One man held his
easily, warm comfort after many years.
Another, newly widowed, juggled desperately,
hardly able to grasp the impossible stone.
Her own reaction of course is that of a poet: “And me? From my palm / the fire stone gives me words”
Words are her realm, and in a different way John’s too, both of them moving on from ordinary un-literary families to find ‘our own class bubble’ in academia. She quotes Richard de Bury, a fourteenth century bibliophile, and comments with relish on his treatise, ‘The Love of Books — it’s almost necromancy’. The poems, like their house, are full of books and literary references. Memories of reading are central to Coates’ memories of the marriage. In poem xiii, she considers bookishness as a possibly unhealthy obsession, questioning whether it might be ‘foolish to be in thrall to a set of books?’ Her conclusion is to reject the ‘clarity of empty shelves’; she advocates passionately and convincingly for what she names ‘hoardiculture’:
Minimalism? Not for me —
‘beneath it all, desire of oblivion runs’.
Oh, do you remember our old tutor, Keith…
We laughed but he would quote ‘These fragments
I have shored against my ruins.’
The PS to this poem is a great example of Coates’ use of bathos, to deflate any possible hint of over-loftiness: “P.S I think my brother went too far when he wanted to keep the jar containing our mother’s ashes”
If Letters for John teaches the reader anything, it is about how rich and precious unpretentious lives can be, and how if at all possible, loss might be endured without losing that understanding. The poems are full of music, good food, films, books of course, shared perceptions and jokes. In addition, despite the close intellectual relationship implied in all the shared references, Coates is not afraid to confront, for instance, the distancing effect of her starting to become a poet:
I was joining another tribe,
more rackety than scholars, dangerous,
in thrall to the poem.
As for the traditional structure of elegies – i.e., roughly speaking, lament, then praise, then solace – Coates as I read her treats this with as much sceptical inquiry as she does when dealing with ‘grief theory.’ The sequence certainly contains elements of all three elegaic features, as well as some of the standard ‘grief’ phases of denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance – but they do not spring up in order, and are often overlaid or contradicted by other emotions. For instance, lamenting that “I suppose you’re done with birthdays now”, she toys with the idea of reincarnation, in the way that the Cathars believed a lost soul would return in the next child; at another moment she compares John’s absence to a distant mountain she never got to visit:
A presence here — but
inaccessible? Another ‘stage’ in grief?
Then, in a later poem, she praises him for respecting her need for solitude:
to find an image for us…
Maybe…willows on each side of a chalk stream,
clear-running, the reflections of our branches
mingling in the water?
A thought that moved me a great deal is in poem xx. Coates is reflecting on John’s fifth birthday anniversary since his death, in which she identifies the waning of her ‘desolation’, the “feel of not to feel it”. This she defines further as a complex mixture of relief with a new kind of grief that this is so, a new emptiness and even a wisp of guilt. A kind of meta-grief perhaps. She welcomes a returning ‘stab’ of pain, then lets that go:
I picked up rose leaves
and felt a welcome, needed stab of desolation.
There’s grief in grief waning because it kept us
close. What’s left after this fag end of sorrow?
Dear gentle love, this is the truth – I miss you
less. This may not be the saddest thing
but it is a sad thing.
Is this book the last in the sequence? Three is a number suited to elegies. And Coates comments near the end of the collection: “This last sprint / of time has wearied me.” In the last poem, Coates’ longing to keep John close has not diminished, but there has been a transfer, the house and its contents re-organised to become her solitary place, even if perhaps for a short while. The sign-off too has changed, from the “Yours ever” we readers have grown accustomed to:
I rise from your chair, light your reading lamp
and these are my books, my notes for poems, this
my quiet place. You are not here (although I’d like
to talk with you about the film — or anything).
…I’m here though. Still. I’m here
for the time being.
Yours always, C.
The final lines suggest closure, but as in all Coates’ poems they do not close the door.
Oct 26 2026
London Grip Poetry Review – Carole Coates
Poetry review – LETTERS FOR JOHN: Alex Josephy is moved by the memories Carole Coates continues to share with her late husband
Letters for John
Carole Coates
Bowstring Poetry
ISBN: 78-1-0676729-0-3
25 pages £8
Letters for John follows in the footsteps of Carole Coates’ previous collections, When the Swimming Pool Fell in the Sea and Dead Letters. Together they form an extended elegy for Coates’ husband, John, who died suddenly in 2020; an impressively sustained illustration of constancy. The poems also constitute a validation of the written word’s power, beyond consoling and bearing witness; as in classic poetry, they seem to me to strive for a particularly literary kind of immortality, while fully acknowledging our essential physical mortality. I’m thinking of course of Shakespeare’s sonnets, for instance sonnet 81:
You still shall live, such virtue hath my pen,
Where breath most breathes, even in the mouths of men.
In this new collection Coates stays with letter form, each three stanza poem numbered (i to xxv), addressed to ‘Dear J’ and signed off ‘Yours ever, C’, each with a brief PS, usually locating the poem’s feet firmly on the ground, however far it has travelled. The form frames them as an on-going one-sided conversation, continued over six years; poignant and often funny memories create the impression of John’s abiding presence. It’s like reading a grief journal, but much enlivened by the poet’s questions, comments and entreaties. The pain of adapting to a life alone remains sharp; after a difficult hospital appointment she complains: “You may have the best of excuses, love, / but you’re still not here when I need you.”
At other moments the poet discusses current interesting events and ideas as she would have done when John was actually present:
What are ‘lies’ now that each person wears his own ‘truth’
like a balaclava, cosy among realities, all self-chosen?
Did you foresee this when you leapt up so angrily
in that public lecture — where was it?— a London college?
In the poem ‘Letters for John (v)’, Coates mentions and wittily dismisses standard grief theories:
I’ve been reading books on ‘Grief’ — they don’t hurt me now,
much. Bewilder rather. Neat stages, maps, the progress
of loss, tick lists, tidy lineup, this then that, a linear
movement of the heart.
However she does trace her progress in enduring heartbreaking loss over time. She compares it to holding a ‘fire stone’. In one poem, a group of bereaved people react differently to what they have to ‘hold’:
One man held his
easily, warm comfort after many years.
Another, newly widowed, juggled desperately,
hardly able to grasp the impossible stone.
Her own reaction of course is that of a poet: “And me? From my palm / the fire stone gives me words”
Words are her realm, and in a different way John’s too, both of them moving on from ordinary un-literary families to find ‘our own class bubble’ in academia. She quotes Richard de Bury, a fourteenth century bibliophile, and comments with relish on his treatise, ‘The Love of Books — it’s almost necromancy’. The poems, like their house, are full of books and literary references. Memories of reading are central to Coates’ memories of the marriage. In poem xiii, she considers bookishness as a possibly unhealthy obsession, questioning whether it might be ‘foolish to be in thrall to a set of books?’ Her conclusion is to reject the ‘clarity of empty shelves’; she advocates passionately and convincingly for what she names ‘hoardiculture’:
Minimalism? Not for me —
‘beneath it all, desire of oblivion runs’.
Oh, do you remember our old tutor, Keith…
We laughed but he would quote ‘These fragments
I have shored against my ruins.’
The PS to this poem is a great example of Coates’ use of bathos, to deflate any possible hint of over-loftiness: “P.S I think my brother went too far when he wanted to keep the jar containing our mother’s ashes”
If Letters for John teaches the reader anything, it is about how rich and precious unpretentious lives can be, and how if at all possible, loss might be endured without losing that understanding. The poems are full of music, good food, films, books of course, shared perceptions and jokes. In addition, despite the close intellectual relationship implied in all the shared references, Coates is not afraid to confront, for instance, the distancing effect of her starting to become a poet:
I was joining another tribe,
more rackety than scholars, dangerous,
in thrall to the poem.
As for the traditional structure of elegies – i.e., roughly speaking, lament, then praise, then solace – Coates as I read her treats this with as much sceptical inquiry as she does when dealing with ‘grief theory.’ The sequence certainly contains elements of all three elegaic features, as well as some of the standard ‘grief’ phases of denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance – but they do not spring up in order, and are often overlaid or contradicted by other emotions. For instance, lamenting that “I suppose you’re done with birthdays now”, she toys with the idea of reincarnation, in the way that the Cathars believed a lost soul would return in the next child; at another moment she compares John’s absence to a distant mountain she never got to visit:
A presence here — but
inaccessible? Another ‘stage’ in grief?
Then, in a later poem, she praises him for respecting her need for solitude:
to find an image for us…
Maybe…willows on each side of a chalk stream,
clear-running, the reflections of our branches
mingling in the water?
A thought that moved me a great deal is in poem xx. Coates is reflecting on John’s fifth birthday anniversary since his death, in which she identifies the waning of her ‘desolation’, the “feel of not to feel it”. This she defines further as a complex mixture of relief with a new kind of grief that this is so, a new emptiness and even a wisp of guilt. A kind of meta-grief perhaps. She welcomes a returning ‘stab’ of pain, then lets that go:
I picked up rose leaves
and felt a welcome, needed stab of desolation.
There’s grief in grief waning because it kept us
close. What’s left after this fag end of sorrow?
Dear gentle love, this is the truth – I miss you
less. This may not be the saddest thing
but it is a sad thing.
Is this book the last in the sequence? Three is a number suited to elegies. And Coates comments near the end of the collection: “This last sprint / of time has wearied me.” In the last poem, Coates’ longing to keep John close has not diminished, but there has been a transfer, the house and its contents re-organised to become her solitary place, even if perhaps for a short while. The sign-off too has changed, from the “Yours ever” we readers have grown accustomed to:
I rise from your chair, light your reading lamp
and these are my books, my notes for poems, this
my quiet place. You are not here (although I’d like
to talk with you about the film — or anything).
…I’m here though. Still. I’m here
for the time being.
Yours always, C.
The final lines suggest closure, but as in all Coates’ poems they do not close the door.