by Austin Farrell
December 10, 2025
All We Are Given We Cannot Hold by Robert Fanning; Dzanc Books; $17.95.
Whenever we experience an immense personal loss, grief sends us on a strange path of reckoning. We backtrack, explore old haunts, and grapple with the impermanence of our lives in hopes that we may find a way to push forward. In Robert Fanning’s newest collection, All We Are Given We Cannot Hold, his speaker confronts his role as a father in mid-life after losing his mother while meditating on love and desire in a violent world placated by ignorance. Fanning impresses us scene after scene, song after song, with his keen observations, immersing the reader within a realm of evocative imagery and flowing music that coalesce into a lyrical intensity of introspective and bittersweet resolves.
In the opening poem, “Inarticula,” impermanence immediately shifts into a coastal scene where the speaker searches for fossils with his children. Perception is at the forefront: the speaker squints, blinks, shields his eyes as he grapples with the fact that his children have grown from toddlers engineering sand castles to fully grown adults in what felt like “a blink ago.” We follow his eyes as he scans various crenelated relics with a “Zen eye,” all of them holding traces of ancient life. It evokes what is no longer there and the speaker suddenly finds himself in solitude acknowledging the early onsets of winter and its “season of erasure.” The author instills within us the same concern as his speaker, that we may also begin to recognize what is fleeting and ancient in our surroundings. “Inarticula” becomes essential in establishing the role of perception in this collection, how one must be willing to search and confront the confines of our existence in order to heal and grow from grief.
The collection is structured by a series of narrative vignettes and lyrical songs that shed light on the speaker’s emotional state, a swirl of compassion and frustration that deepens as he bears witness to others who lack his newfound outlooks. In a Tupelo Quarterly interview about the collection, Fanning compares his manuscript structure to a music album, aiming to sequence his poems like movements. This is achieved not only in poem sequencing, but through Fanning’s virtuosity with language and prosody, giving each poem a musical variance that ranges from symphonic to solemn. This can be observed especially in these last stanzas of a later poem in the collection, “Strange Music:”
There’s never been a song such as stay
In a world of always. Falling away
Is all I hear. The current rushes
inside. A deep crescendo crush
To fill the momentary hush.
There’s never been such a song as stay.
As I let go, strange music arose—
The only song the body knows:
Nothing holds. Forever flows
always. From a world of falling away
Fanning here reworks the parameters of a villanelle to create a song of reckoning where revelation in the speaker’s thought is inextricably tied to the musical pulse that comes with such a poet’s mastery of prosody. His lines bloom upon the tongue while opening us up to an often quiet wisdom through music that sounds both familiar and new.
The album-esque sequencing Fanning has curated gives this collection a balanced pacing that never feels overwhelming or lacking for a larger work. Although some poems occasionally restate previous sentiments or lack the stature of the collection’s stronger poems, their inclusion allows for variance throughout the collection’s main narrative thread. Reading this collection is an invitation by the author into their personal process of articulation and discovery. The emotional depth of these poems, the crux of the collection, is supported by Fanning’s aesthetic intuition and readers should approach it with that respect.
The most striking sections of Fanning’s collection are the elegiac poems near the collection’s end. The author weaves us through a patchwork of memories involving his late mother, enabling the audience to inhabit his grieving process. Each poem sheds more light on the mother’s role as a model for love while revealing it as a source of the speaker’s sensitivity throughout the collection. The speaker sits vigil for his mother in “Boats” and “The Hunger Stones,” contemplating mortality as he bears witness to her frail condition. This attentiveness to his mother’s mortality transgresses into a quiet rage in “Shark Week” where his brothers distract themselves with devices and entertainment, unable to directly confront the painful reckonings of grieving a loved one. Frustration heightens in “No Mom, Today” as the speaker notices a father as he “blindly scrolls and scrolls” while his exuberant daughter begs for attention, all while the speaker sits in his mother’s spot at their favorite restaurant recalling less attentive times in their relationship. Although we continuously confront grief’s overwhelming aftermath, Fanning reminds us that it is of the same impermanence as death, that one day, it will begin to dissipate into newfound love “the way a veil of clouds reveals the momentary stars.”
All We Are Given We Cannot Hold teaches us that grief becomes a process of edification, that we are able to come out on the other side of such a painful journey with a vital gratitude in respect to the impermanence of loved ones, as well as a more principled attitude towards a violent civilization. The readers of this collection will likely enter back into the exterior world with the same eye as Fanning’s speaker, scanning both pastoral and urban landscapes for something like a prayer, something ancient.
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“Where once there was a sea:” Impermanence and Grief in Robert Fanning’s All We Are Given We Cannot Hold
POETRY REVIEW
Image by James Lee from Pexels
Austin Farrell is a poet from Moro, Arkansas. He received an MFA from The University of Michigan where he was a Zell Fellow. He is an associate poetry editor for West Trade Review.
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