Poetry Talk - My Oarsman with Geri Radacsi (Virtual)

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Geri Radacsi’s My Oarsman describes the many joys of marital love, interrupted by her anguish dealing courageously with her husband's battle with cancer, and her grief at his death. About the book Baron Wormser writes, “My Oarsman portrays the fullness of life and loss and is, at once, devastating and affirming. We leave these pages having come to know a couple in their dark moments and lighthearted ones over the course of decades. Then—and the poems are unflinching—one dies. The other remains, testifying in one carefully wrought poem after another to how ravenous emotion can be, how telling, how fulfilling, how desolating, yet always crucial, always sensitive to the stature of long-standing love.”

And this from Robert Cording: “I’ve read and enjoyed and marveled over all of Geri Radacsi’s previous books: her feel for just the right image, or the inventive way she plays out her metaphors, or finds the right voice for her subject matter. But this new book—about her married life of fifty-four years with her husband John, her care for him as his cancer worsened, and her grief after he died—is a brave and loving testimony both to her married life and to the writer’s dilemma: all the words (and this writer employs all her powers here) a writer conjures up cannot keep death and sorrow from their calling. This book bravely faces the ‘furies’ that ‘make’ and ‘unmake’ their life together. 

Susan Deborah King adds this: “Geri Radacsi’s My Oarsman is a visionary, richly lyrical, nearly unparalleled testament to the power of love, as well as a fierce outcry of grief about what love is not able to bring about in the face of death. As her husband’s companion through his long process of dying, Radacsi bears witness to every nuance of his suffering, his bravery in it and—with deep tenderness, spiritual fortitude, and, at times, humor—to the fast connection they enjoyed throughout their lives. This moving elegy is a distinguished achievement by an already accomplished poet at the height of her talent, baring her beautiful, burst-open heart.” And Margaret Gibson notes that “In the poem ‘Body Cry’ and throughout this book, the poems say in wrenching and plaintive phrases: Hear my love. Bless the words.”