Poet Sharon Charde on grief, memory and ‘What’s After Making Love’

Poet Sharon Charde will appear at The White Hart Inn in Salisbury on Sunday, Feb. 1, as part of the White Hart Speaker Series, in conversation with poet Sally van Doren, to discuss Charde’s new collection, “What’s After Making Love.” The event is free, with registration requested.

The book traces a woman’s life from childhood through marriage, motherhood, and maturity, but its emotional core emerges from the death of Charde’s son, Geoff.

“Life is no longer ordinary once one has experienced grief,” said Charde. After his death, she said, grief felt “like a heavy marble coat I’d been sentenced to wear — forever,” raw and invasive, altering every experience. When a friend’s child asked if she and her husband would ever be happy again, her answer was simple: “Not for a long time.”

The poems do not suggest grief fades. Instead, they reflect how it changes shape. “After some years — and this takes much work — I learned to carry grief differently,” said Charde, describing how support from family and friends, therapy, prayer and writing allowed her to keep going. Loss, she shared, made life more fragile but also more vivid, sharpening her appreciation for love, deepening her marriage, and making ordinary moments more poignant. Poetry became a way to “take the inchoate and shape it into something outside myself — my poems, prayers for healing.”

The collection’s title grew from a poem written many years ago, reflecting on love as both joy and risk. “Everything comes after making love,” Charde said. The phrase became, for her, “an umbrella under which all could fall,” a way to hold the whole of a life without simplifying it.

Memory, too, plays a central role in the book. Charde distinguishes between factual memory and what she calls the memory of the spirit, shaped by emotion and time. “Memory is unreliable,” she said, but poetry allows it to be burnished into meaning. Writing, for her, remains a mysterious process: “I never know what will come when I sit down with paper and pen.”

Charde will be joined by Sally van Doren, a longtime friend and colleague she first met at a poetry workshop in Squaw Valley in 1999. Their conversation will reflect years of shared literary community, teaching, creative practice and will include readings from the book and questions from the audience.

The event is at 2 p.m. at The White Hart Inn, 15 Undermountain Road, Salisbury.

Free; registration requested at oblongbooks.com