Great Regulars: Nowadays, of course, the dead watch

these events on television, after their "processing" (has the door already opened and shut as they pass through?), and doing so they come to learn their own remoteness from them--learn, in effect, to let go. Yet there is nothing sensationally grotesque about this. Instead, there is only the "limiting candour" that [Thom] Gunn has described elsewhere, in a poem that also looks down on the world, viewing it from an airplane over the Pacific Ocean: "a cold hard light without break/that reveals merely what is".

Death's Door

from The Times Literary Supplement: Poem of the Week: Death's Door

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