Warwick McFadyen, MCFADYEN MEDIA, ISBN 9780646840581
The Ocean is a beautiful book – part memoir, part diary, part a collection of poems, all written after the death of Warwick McFadyen’s young son Hamish at the age of 21. The writer is a distinguished journalist and poet. The prose pieces that introduce the collection are poetic in their imagery, and the poems explore deeply the tidal currents of grief. Their attentiveness recalls C S Lewis’ response to his wife’s death in A Grief Observed. Both authors have a gift for words but experience the total inadequacy of words to touch the depths of grief while knowing that they must remain faithful to words precisely because of their failure.
The Ocean is necessarily full of descriptions of this failure – to recall a dead son to life, to touch another’s grief, to rise above it and to describe it adequately, to preserve an ever-eroding memory, and most bitterly of all, to hear grief dismissed as a mental illness.
In The Ocean, the poems and reflections return again and again to the images of nature that mimic life and death and the passing of time – the waves and tides of the sea, the growth of trees and the change of seasons:
Here is the lapping of each moment
from rock of cradle to silent grave,
this is the voice that no longer travels
but for what is left and what it gave.