What is the meaning of heaven? Or who is supposed to understand heaven? There is the familiar thinking about heaven as a comfort to those anticipating their death. The notion that whatever death represents, there is something beyond death. But what does this mean to the people the dead leave behind? In this case, Webb lost a close childhood friend. And whatever heaven Mormonism would have said they went to, there is distance. And the book has different images for filling that distance in. Like if heaven could be understood as a concept—something the living alone would need to understand, then Webb’s book is an elaboration of that concept.
Perhaps it’s not unusual to write poetry about a grief that distorts all the ways life is supposed to make sense. It is unusual for grief to be the embodied understanding of heaven. Heaven as a state of mind occupied by living people who think about those they lost. And for Webb’s book, bewilderment like this isn’t just a state of mind, it’s a way of life. Why did she lose this other person? How is she supposed to orient her life without this other person?
And it’s Webb’s Mormon upbringing that begins to distinguish her book from others’ elegiac work. Because how does a man like Joseph Smith presume to understand what heaven is? Or to model heaven around structure and order? Plat’s epigraph from Joseph Smith outlines the diagram of a “celestial city,” a “Plat of Zion.” But where Smith lays out order, with boxes boxing one another in, Webb’s garden, or her house lays out the bewildering heaven she occupies in her grief. Using imagery that might be more easily compared to Joseph Cornell’s shadow boxes. Art that evokes a familiar domestic kind of space, but then takes great liberties with how that space might be arranged. The open question: How is someone to presume knowing where someone they’ve lost “is” now. Yes, there is the feminist questioning of Joseph Smith’s presumption to know the actual heaven, and the unusual determination about its extreme symmetrical order).
This is the nature of Webb’s book occupying a garden where “plat” and grief might intertwine. Or later “plat” and estate or mansion (bringing in, I think, one of my favorite Biblical inversions—a house with. many mansions). In the between of these juxtapositions, there exists a series of questions. Is a person closest to heaven when they suffer the grief of someone dying? Is there a reasonable comparison to discover between the Biblical garden and heaven? And if there is did the resemble change when the Biblical garden was seen in the moonlight?
The following tags are a purely subjective approach I’ve used for reading this book. Tagging, for me, acknowledges that slotting a book into hard categories or “schools” can be elusive when it comes to 21st Century poetry. In response, I’ve developed tags whose lenses operate from subject matter, identity poetics, and stylistics.