“‘After great pain, a formal feeling comes’ Dickinson taught us, and I can’t escape those words as I read through Jan Freeman’s poems of remembrance, her elegies—or, wait, not elegies exactly, but musical symphonies of mourning, where silence is the most important instrument. Jan Freeman knows of those of stunned moments . . . the mythology of loss, the spell of it. . . . This, a magical book, stands up to silence with ‘voices’ which do not console against the mystery of death, but open it to us. And so the silences are those we once heard. When? Before the language itself, perhaps. Before it invaded our lungs, our mouths. How one person’s throat is shaped by other person’s rages, how each of us stands ‘like a section of a fence, disconnected,’ how we love—yes, love, that most of all—you learn in this book, this strange, wise, marvelous Blue Structure to live with.”