The Distance Measured in Days A Novel

A poet and his wife experiment with love and life in the early seventies. They explore the Middle-East and entertain their intellectual friends in a house decorated with kelims. Tragedy knocks this life out of kilter. Their daughter dies of cot-death just as their relationship is at its most fragile. The world splinters into a frightening kaleidoscope of images from the past and from the present. While attempts are made to reconcile the harshness of their loss with some strategy of togetherness for the future, this bitter, poignant text offers no mystical or sentimental resolution of the dissonance of emotional pain. The author shows how grief can produce a distancing effect, a sensation of being an outsider at one's own ceremonies of mourning. A numbing of the senses insulates the poet from breakdown, but it also conducts him into brutish action. Here the loss of a child is seen from a male point-of-view. The Distance Measured in Days employs innovative techniques to duplicate with force the emotional state of bereavement. The result sets forth the condition which grief may entail with no redemption posited beyond the integrity of its portrayal.