GRIEF is the sad commonality of humanity. Bereavement is personal. Grief affects the living with the anguish of the dying. Bereavement is the aftermath.

Simplistically this is the theme of Michel Faber’s first poetry collection. However, the demands of art introduce their own complexities for the artist. Faber, justifiably acclaimed as an award-winning novelist, needs a narrative to bring a momentum to the 64 poems in this wonderfully executed book of secular psalms. (May I also commend Canongate for the obvious care and attention in producing this handsome publication.) There are two sections: though they are not designated as such they are sequentially preoccupied with grief and bereavement.

The subject of the mourning within a marriage is Eva Youren, Faber’s wife for 26 years. In 2008 she was diagnosed with incurable cancer of the marrow: “You may experience/necrosis of the jaw, the collapse/of your spine, the disintegration/of your skeleton,... You may also, if you’re vigilant, detect/psychiatric side-effects... At certain stages of the cycle/you may find yourself getting tearful/for no apparent reason”.

Eva died in the summer of 2014 “I dozed. You were not dead... For 20 minutes, 30 maybe,/my eyes were closed./ That was the time you chose”.

When they first met in Melbourne in 1987 both were emerging from unsuccessful earlier marriages. Both had also had broken links from religious and intolerant parents. Eva’s were Jehovah’s Witnesses. Faber’s “very war-damaged” Dutch Baptists. They moved to Scotland in the 1990s and lived for most of the subsequent times together in the Highlands on a farm in Fearn.

Excavating death in the family is an honourable Scottish literary tradition. Most eminent are the tender Elegies (1985) for his wife Lesley who died in 1981 by poet and academic Douglas Dunn. More recently there was the enraged sense of abandonment and anger at the loss of a lover in Imtiaz Dharker’s Over the Moon (2014). But following my first reading of Faber’s collection the lines that came immediately to my mind were those of the recently deceased Geoffrey Hill when he recalls the surviving member of a marriage being “as if he spent the night/in hell on earth”.

The book opens with a rewrite of a poem first published in 1984: “Although there is no God, let us not leave off praying”. Then as their lives begin to unravel the poems get edgier and more brutal. A haematologist is judgementally observed: “His hand were shaking./It would be nice to think/his tremble was distress/at causing pain to one/so beautiful and in her prime,/and not from drink.”

In Helpmeet the poet enunciates his “strategies for coping”: “Insomnia/Pneumonia./Staring at the ceiling./eBay dealing./Weeping./Moping.” Confessing mutual mental collapse, “We were messpots, the pair of us,/marooned up there in Fearn”. Time passes and food for the patient is consumed by her husband: “I ate it for you./I drink your water for you, too,/in those last days when/I’m no longer measuring”. They phone Dignitas, “But Switzerland gave no reply”. In death “two guys in fancy suits”, the undertakers, “treat you gently”. Grief has had its moment.

In Part Two bereavement is continually altering the configuration of the future. The author sadly acknowledges: “I see the first of all the moons/we will not share.” Informing friends and relatives he admits “I’m scared, it’s all been left too late, I wish/that we could handle this together”. He is abrupt with those who say “If there’s anything/we can do, anything at all,/don’t hesitate to ask.” Her computer mocks him, “overrun/with matter that’s no use to anyone... Your inbox pullulates with this stuff./The senders have no way of knowing/you have had enough.” Faber comes to uneasy complicity with her absence. In the final poem he writes “you’re dead. I know. And it is not for me/to show you death is not the end./But you left lucencies of grace/secreted in the world,/still glowing.” Lucencies are “those pale glows/revealed by radiography.”

Now Faber recognises he too “has had enough”. He admits he has found consolation with another bereaved person. In a recent interview he said, “Everyone deals with grief differently, and there are going to be people who just don’t wish to go where these poems are going to take them.” He concludes, speaking of his wife, “she had expanded so much love and energy into making me more connected with others, that I felt I owed it to her to go out there and be more connected than ever. And in a way I am living on her planet more now” .

Scarred over the years by the grief and then bereavement, he has found, perhaps through art, a “healing” consolation.

He has become the “Undying” of his title.

Undying: A Love Story by Michel Faber is published by Canongate, priced £12.99