The Crash Wake and Other Poems

Owen Lowery’s posthumously published The Crash Wake and Other Poems is a moving exploration of precarity. A longtime tetraplegic, Lowery writes from within his experience of disability, but the poems also reflect on the traumas of a serious car crash and on a long recovery suddenly exacerbated by COVID-19. The first part of the book—104 untitled poems, each comprised of three quatrains—reads like a real-time chronology of evolving concerns now familiar to many of us: masks, canceled weddings, the burden on essential workers. Interspersed throughout are haunting memories:

 […]flashback
to that moment when our
world froze, the slowed time of the crash, 
the crack of metal being pulled 
and clipped apart

And there are also images drawn from the world outside the poet’s quarantine window: “Gold and red / come through, clearer / skies, a chance for us to need / and be needed in return.”

While the poems in the second half of the collection feel less thematically cohesive, the specter of danger remains, and with it, a sense of urgency, as in these lines from “Mermaid Drowning Wendy,” one of several ekphrasis poems on art by Paula Rego: “A tail / cracks like a loose sail, / slides down, swallowed, folded // away.” In a series of memorial poems, the poet reflects on tragedies like the catastrophic landslide in Aberfan in 1966: “The graveyard slides / down the hill riding / time with wide-eyed children.” 

These poems powerfully depict the tenuousness of our brief existences, which is underscored, sadly, by Lowery’s own death in 2021. There is solace to be found in Lowery’s work, which reminds us that ephemerality is something we can learn to accept, even as we struggle to survive. For Lowery, the ultimate comfort comes from love, and throughout this collection, he turns time and again to his wife:

Knowing your hand 
on mine as an instinct, one of the tracks
down which dreams expand.