Living 'Next Door to the Dead'

ABOUT 20 YEARS AGO, just after she and her husband had bought a house in the countryside outside of Louisville, Ky., Kathleen Driskell returned home from the grocery to find her driveway filled with cars. With one arm grasping bags of food and the other holding on to her young son, she looked around to see what was happening. Mournful figures in dark coats were moving back and forth in the lot next door to her house. And then her eyes rested on something that made her jaw drop: a hearse.

On one hand, Driskell shouldn’t have been surprised. The house she and her husband purchased was actually an old country church dating from the 1850s, which they had begun converting into a home, transforming the sanctuary into an open living and dining room and using the honey-colored pews to build a staircase. Like most rural churches from the 19th century, it was right beside a graveyard. But the old preacher who sold them the building had assured them it was no longer in use, that there would be no more burials. “I asked him flat out,” she recalls with a smile. “And he said that it was full up and it’s been full up.”

Over the years, there have been eight or nine more burials in the graveyard next door. But after recovering from her initial shock at happening upon that first scene, Driskell realized that she didn’t mind. “I just don’t think about graveyards that way,” she says. “I never really have thought about them as being spooky places.” Instead, she has found herself inspired by the cemetery and its dead—so intrigued, in fact, that she has written a poetry collection about her experience with her “neighbors,” as she calls them, documenting her literal and imaginative walks among the tombstones.

When it was published in August, critics hailed Next Door to the Dead as “an arresting testament” that “gives honor to the dead, and also praises the living.” Poet and Pulitzer Prize finalist Maurice Manning observed, “One of the impressive features is how it works not simply as a collection of poems, but also as a whole book that deepens and expands with each page.”

Such depth is due to Driskell’s undeniable gifts as a poet, in her ability to excavate layer after layer of the twin themes of loss and mortality. In “The Mower,” the narrator observes the stoic man who arrives on Saturday mornings to trim the grass around the grave of his young son, wondering if it triggered poignant memories for him of mowing “a yard with fruit / trees and a swing set and a fire pit / and a swimming pool that sits above ground, and a fort that threatens to collapse.”

“Lament for the Crow” captures the narrator stumbling upon a dead bird in the graveyard, its form “resting in a cradle / of long soft grass.” She spies its living kin in the nearby treetops, and observes how “Like / humans, they confront / the open grave in their own way.”

Driskell says that the collection itself began in a similar fashion, from the bird’s eye view that her home offered. Although she had written several poems over the years set in this graveyard and others, the idea for a themed collection began with the death of a neighbor’s 23-year-old son and the grief that she witnessed at his burial next door. “It’s just different when a young person dies,” she explains. “[The people buried in the graveyard] are mostly really elderly people, and they were maybe the last of their families that were going to be buried here. And then you hardly see [their family members] again.”

She says the young people “keep coming” to visit their friend. “They don’t go away. Over the years there’s been this sort of steady parade. That was really when I started to cohere around the idea [of] what it meant to have old graves, and new graves, and graves of people who were elderly, and people who were very young.”

Driskell discovered that confining her collection to “the three-quarter acre of the graveyard” was creatively liberating. “I soon found that I could write about whatever I wanted ... even though I was writing about a really small plot of ground here. So [in the book] I have domestic violence poems, I have a lot of anti-war poems, relationship poems, a lot of poems about mothering. I have poems that are pretty historical. It kind of freed me to do whatever I wanted.”

One element that she was determined to include was that of surprise. In a book filled with poems about death, she notes that a danger is that it could have become macabre, collapsing under the weight of darkness. To avoid this hazard, she decided to include moments of humor to inject some light, saying, “We have jokes about death all the time, and we have tons of euphemisms that are kind of funny.” With that in mind, one can almost hear Driskell’s laughter as she opens the poem “Epitaph: Jesus Called and Wanda Answered” with “Let us think of Wanda / next time our phones ring.”

Despite the collection’s focus on death, she believes that, at its core, the book is really about something else. “I think it’s a book above love, or trying to find love,” she explains. “I mean, I just have a different view—maybe because I look out the window and see [the graveyard] all the time. It weights me, but it’s not like a burden—it’s more like ballast, if that makes sense. If you’re looking out the window when you’re doing your laundry and you see gravestones, you realize that ‘I’m not going to be here forever.’ If you sit there and you watch people come in and out of the graveyard, you think about your own kids, and your family members, and the people you love, and how you want to treat them that day. Nobody who is buried there probably thought they were going there that day. Even if you’re really ill, you just don’t know.”

That thought, formed in part by living in an old Lutheran church and peering at the adjacent graveyard, has helped Driskell construct what she calls “a kind of church of my own.” For her, she explains, “Heaven is what you leave in the mind of others. When I think about immortality, I’m looking out there, and I want to be as good as I can, leave good memories for my children, try to be heroic if I can in my little ways, try to treat other people kindly, so that there’s a little piece of heaven left in their minds about me. And that’s why writing is so important, too—really we’re talking about leaving stories.”

Driskell has plenty more of those in store. Later this year, Red Hen Press will publish her fourth poetry collection, Blue Etiquette. Inspired by Emily Post’s classic Etiquette—the blue linen cover on the first edition released in 1922 became so iconic that later editions included the subtitle The Blue Book of Social Usage—Driskell’s collection includes poems based on characters and rituals of domestic life and traditions. “When I read [Post’s book], I realized that my folks would have been the servants that she was talking about managing,” she smiles. “And so I’ve written poems [with] silverware, like an oyster fork or a fruit knife. I have restaurant poems in there, I have working-class poems, I have poems that are kind of done in [Post’s voice]—things about work and manners.”

In between her time serving as professor of creative writing at Spalding University in Louisville and associate program director of its acclaimed low-residency MFA program in writing, Driskell is also making a foray into fiction. Her novel, she says, is a coming-of-age story centered on a young girl in the Bible Belt that explores “the tolerance of religious people toward nonbelievers [and the] tolerance of nonbelievers toward the religious.”

As Driskell moves through her home, walking up the stairs fashioned from pews and pointing out the tough, pre-Civil War roof beams, she says that she and her husband have talked about moving into the city, where they can be closer to restaurants and the theater. But she looks around now, surveying her home, and muses about how much of her identity is wrapped up in this old church, and among the gravestones next door. “It’s amazing what you can get used to.”