Greater Ghost

Christian J. Collier

Four Way Books

September 2024

88 pages | $17.95

Greater Ghost is the first collection of poetry published by Chattanooga-based writer, teaching artist, and arts organizer Christian J. Collier. The book engages the author’s experiences with death and dying in a litany of ways, from the private tragedy of a girlfriend’s miscarriage to the public outrage that accompanies deadly incidents of gun violence. Collier’s poems are haunted and infected by loss, and the collection is constrained—beneficially so—by its inability to emerge from the ecosystem of death that surrounds the speakers and inhabitants of the poems. God, ghosts, the unnamed dead, and the living men and women who remain behind to mourn the deceased populate the book. In his collection, Collier gives readers of contemporary poetry a new vocabulary for a distinctly Southern and distinctly Black means of navigating the end of life and mourning. In poems that serve as records of loss, documents of private and public mourning, and written incantations that channel voices of living and dead alike, Collier’s writing marks the horrific intimacy of death and ways that poetry can sublimate and commemorate the dead.

            For Collier, death and loss are simultaneously personal and communal, whether that loss stems from the intimate community of a man and a woman who are suffering from the miscarriage of their child or from the collective sorrow, anguish, and rage that emerge in the Black community when yet another man or woman loses their life to gun violence. Collier writes poignantly of the sickness and exhaustion that emerge from repeated narratives of Black murder, suffering, and death in the book’s final poem, titled “When My Days Fill with Ghosts”:

NAMES is dead.

I watch the last few seconds of his life

in landscape mode on my cell phone.

I know, then, I have had enough.

I can never willingly see the end for anyone else Black.

I am too full on death to want to witness any more. (67)

Such loss, for Collier, is not simply an external, objective deprivation, but a loss that is felt within the viewer (and mourner) himself. In such a vein, perceiving death and bearing witness to its reality are linked actions that combine to form parts of a survivor’s responsibility. Collier does not sugarcoat or glance away from these narratives of loss and heartbreak, but neither does he wallow in self-pity; poems convey the brutal fullness of grief, yet forge unexpected connections between individuals, between the living and the dead, between vulnerable speech acts that articulate loss and the unspeakable silences that remain behind when a loved one has passed on.

Poems in Greater Ghost do not contain any names; these indicators of nominal individuality are omitted or redacted from Collier’s writing. This move has a twofold effect: first, it preserves the anonymity of the dead in the collection and allows Collier to keep their identities shrouded behind a veil of privacy. Second, the poet’s decision to redact proper names illustrates how the dead, deprived of material signs of their individuality (such as a face, a name, a likeness), sink into a nearly nameless state of being. In a poem titled “The Day of the Funeral,” Collier writes explicitly about the loss of the name that accompanies death and is its consequence.

We become nameless together,

transform for a swell of hours into      the family.

The left behind.                      The grieving.

On this day, we give your child

the world that took you from her, everything

we try to hope better.

Not a trail of ugly hours to cry into,

a litany of purpled skies no peach-winged beast has touched. (41)

Besides the mentioned aesthetic affections of name-erasure, the dead’s namelessness in the poems of Greater Ghost permits readers to step into the collection and envision their own deceased occupying its pages. To this end, Collier delicately walks the line between the generic sorrows of death and the specific anguish that accompanies each individual loss.

But the living men and women of Greater Ghost often find themselves holding open a space for the dead and must prevent neglect and oblivion from allowing the dead to be forgotten. In the poem “What Was Found,” Collier writes of:

[His] steady brown hands,

at home in shed blood.           Sometimes,

I’m tired of the dead, the bulk of their mounting names.

Sometimes, I’m tired of trying

To keep the frost & rubble from their dying out. (8)

In this vein, Collier employs the language of divinity, faith, and holiness to shore up the category of the living and to celebrate and aesthetically embalm those who have passed away. As he phrases it in the poem “Beloved,” “there isn’t much difference between beauty and the ominous” (13). Holiness and appeals to divinity serve as a kind of buffer against the utter bleakness of meaningless loss. And the category of the sacred can be expanded, which Collier does though poetic language that functions as prayer, incantation, and plea for the living to hold onto their dead through love and memory. As he writes at the end of “The Men in My Family Disappeared,” a poem that describes the ritual of a pre-funeral basketball game, filled with unpleasant truths and bitter laughter:

I can’t say if any of us knew where the body goes exactly

once it sifts through the salted colony of the skin, but I know

in the South, we sacred all we can to stay living, holy what is ours

before some rabid hand wrestles it away. (12)

In these poems, the sacred and “rabid” mingle and the sacred proves itself to be the more durable. The language of incantation also enters at key points within the collection to enact performances of loss and mourning. Incantation and prayer also allow Collier to make explicit his own fears and anxieties surrounding death, drawing himself into community with the dead and, by extension, with those who will someday become dead. The poet begins “Leaving the Earth” with these lines:

As we gallop down the runway & scale cloud-peppered sky,

I chant the seven names of my airborne dead & feel them close.

They see me shudder

at the thought of becoming one of them, the unbreathing. I admit:

I never get nearer to God than when I wish not to join Him. (26)

Collier’s “chant” permeates the poems of Greater Ghost and transforms the collection into a space of ritualized performance, set on the page so that the dead too—whether infant, adult cousin, or compete stranger—can remain.

By the collection’s conclusion, the lingering affect is one of intimacy as loss blurs into loss and love and kinship fill in the gaps that death has left behind. The final poems arrive at a space of peace, as the poet articulates ways that the dead can live on through living memories and can persist by the chants and prayers articulated by those left behind. As Collier writes in “In His Place,”

Somewhere beyond the window, wind drags its ghost

through the leaf-smudged trees.

It reaches in

 
to pull my face from the news of another Black man murdered.

This little wonder of nature,                the bullet

bringing my cousin back to me,                       allowing

his voice

to pass from the paunch of one realm to the next

to tell me

I am on his mind. (5)