After Image

In Jenny George’s After Image, “The body is not a place” and “[w]hat you think is form / is just a kind of trembling.” Together, the poems in this collection offer a poignant and unique tableau that conveys the difficulty of describing the moment when someone dies, how the body transforms,

Over the hours spanning dead of night 
and early dawn, her face 
changed to a stone under the surface 
of a bright, transparent stream.

These lines from “Ars Poetica” capture the speaker observing a loved one making their final transition overnight. The poem has a dreamlike quality to it, and the speaker expresses a sense of detachment from the situation,

            Like sex— 
one part of me always remains 
utterly unmoved.

George’s images are vivid and haunting, with an almost surreal quality to them. In these poems, death is both protagonist and guide, lifting the proverbial veil and allowing the speaker to imagine what lies beyond.

She died. It floats on my vision like a burn: 
Hands folded like a bride. Dark cave 
of the mouth, open—as if a great sound 
were being drawn in.

In scientific terms an afterimage is the lingering visual impression that remains once something is no longer visible. George’s poems function as lyrical afterimages of the deceased:

In the photograph, she is wearing a white dress. 
Eyelets all down the front: little weepholes. 
She is standing under the blooming theater 
of an apricot tree, looking out from her not-knowing, 
her being-alive.

With remarkable grace, these poems attempt to grasp the significance of death as both a physical and a metaphysical phenomenon: "I’m in the world but I still want the world."