Our Side
Carol Muske-Dukes’s poem “Our Side,” published
in 2003, is about the loss of a lover. Many of the
poems in Sparrow, the collection in which this
poem appears, are about death. The collection is
dedicated to the poet’s husband, David Dukes, who
died unexpectedly in 2000. In “Our Side,” the
speaker tries to call back the spirit of someone she
has loved and who has died. She wants him to re-
turn in some form to “our side,” the side of the liv-
ing. The speaker admits that she understands that
this need to see “the lost,” those who have died, is
one-sided. The living, the speaker says, are the ones
who have the need to be remembered. This view is
the opposite of the belief and practice of most peo-
ple, who visit the graves of the dead in attempts to
remember them, to memorialize them. Although it
is about death and about longing on the part of
someone who has lost a lover, “Our Side” is not
morbid or melancholic. By the end of the poem,
readers are much more aware of the love felt by
the speaker than they are of death. The poem is a
love song rather than a requiem.Author Biography
Carol Muske-Dukes is the director and founder of
the graduate program in literature and creative writ-
ing at the University of Southern California, where
she also teaches poetry. She is a reviewer for the
New York Times Book Reviewand the Los Angeles
Times Book Review, for which she writes a regularCarol Muske-Dukes
2003
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