A Keening Conversation
With writer & death doula S. Preston Duncan
I thoroughly enjoyed being invited to have a conversation about attitudes to death and keening with a writer I very much admire (and who is also a death doula), S. Preston Duncan.
In out chat we discussed where I got started with keening (very much an invitation than a choice) what such indigenous grief practices can offer our grief phobic culture, and meandered along visiting Irish colonialism, the highly skilled ritual of keening and the keening woman as an archetype.
The article is hosted on Seven Ponds which is a website focusing on end-of-life planning and support, it aims to provide a comprehensive resource and community for those seeking information, tools, and resources related to death and dying, including topics like advance care directives, cremation, natural burial, and personalized end-of-life experiences.
Blood Alluvium by S. Preston Duncan
Check out the poetry book by S. Preson DUncan who I had the conversation with, here’s a snippet of a review of his work:
In Duncan’s new collection Blood Alluvium (Parlyaree Press), described as ‘a seance in verse’, every poem is charged and pulses with an electric current.
‘Go, find God./ Tell them we are cratered with opioid’, Duncan writes and indeed these are intoxicating and heady poems indeed – alchemical, transformative, time traveling and steely with portent and purpose.
A death doula in Richmond, America, and evidently inspired by the otherworldly and the rich symbols of the arcane and biblical, Duncan’s voice is full of magic and power. His imagery melds the organic and the uncanny (in ‘Harvest’ – there is ‘a trauma/ with human eyes’, hair is ‘demolished haystacks’, a song is ‘written in bird shot’ and ‘a preacher drags something ruined across the sky’.)