Spells for Not Dying Again

It is Diana O'Hehir’s great gift as a writer that she can encompass in language as bright and faceted as garlands of jewels the most bewildering of our common human experiences and the deepest most troublesome of our emotions, without allowing them the complexity or sentimentality which so often attends their expression. With the glyphs of ancient Egypt shadowing the voice and temperament of a fin de siecle Californian, this remarkable poet-already widely reputed for her previous collections of poetry and her distinguished fiction-has written a sequence of poems which are exactly what the title indicates, enchantments by which we avert the re-living of experiences too painful to keep contemplating. Ironically, of course, it is only by such contemplation that these spells achieve their great potency. Those who read and re-read these poems (few would read them just once) must find themselves, each time, purged in spirit as the rituals from the Book of the Dead effected their catharsis on Diana O'Hehir’s ancient precursors.