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Survivable World

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These poems speak artfully and with firsthand knowledge about the human impact of AIDS.

Few poets have been able to convey the power of a love story as that that Ron Mohring shares in his gently gripping collection of poems SURVIVABLE WORLD. Though these poems are all connected to the loss of his lover David to AIDS, they refuse to enter the realm of morose, morbid, and synthetically manipulated sobbings. Instead what Mohring has created are captured memories and moments of a life shared as wholly as any two lovers in memory. His poems delineate the struggle with the slow decline of the exodus from the living world in a matter of fact style that allows the reader to observe the complex machinations of the daily routines that accompany disease - the thoughts from the caregiver role as well as the lover's quiet anguish, watching the one person that has completed his life, slowly, and with both loss of dignity that is real, as well as the loving that makes the coping mechanisms beautiful.

Mohring gives us the memories born before the disease, the shock and ultimate management of reality, the quiet moments of death and goodbyes, and even the post mortem attempts to find life again, alone. In TO HAVE AND TO HOLD he ends his poem with these words: '...You'd gone before/ the funeral, before the doctor signed/ you dead, switched off the machine/ bullying your lungs. I would touch your skull - / frontal, parietal, occipital - and mourn what it/ contained, what couldn't last, knowing/ this receptacle was all that would remain,/ gutted bowl and useless frame kiln-fired, fractured,/ packaged and delivered to my living hands.'

This miraculous collection of poems will doubtless be a source of comfort to the survivors of this plague, but is should be read by everyone who faces the truths of mortality. There is a generous amount of love in SURVIVABLE WORLD, enough to encourage even the most fragile among us whose vision of death is threatening. In Ron Mohring's hand life becomes even more treasured. Highly recommended. Grady Harp, December 08

I recently bought and read Mohring's Survivable World. This is a book of beautiful, harsh, soft, exacting words on love, desire, and a body's decline. I think a qualifier of truly great poetry is whether we'd read a poem aloud to someone else. More than once, I've done this with my favorite poems in Survivable World, the shorter of which I'll copy below.

"David Speaks in a Dream" recommends the book in a way better than my own words possibly can--I give Mohring's book my highest recommendation, to anyone who's had, or lost, a friend with AIDS, or simply to anyone who's loved--in short, to anyone.

"David Speaks in a Dream"

Not in sleep are you closest
to the dead. Not in dreams.

It is after making love: the hammering
heart, the incandescent soul, the two

synchronized: the body has focused
almost enough energy

to throw itself away.
I am nearly with you then.

Like Rafael Campo, Mohring writes with authority about matters of the heart where it concerns the tragedy and loss experienced by those with AIDS, especially gay men.