Inventory by Rob Schlegel

Inventory by Rob Schlegel

A book-length poem serving as a son’s elegy for his late father, an artist and forest steward.

Rob Schlegel’s long poem Inventory emerges from three discrete inventories the poet must catalog in the aftermath of a sudden loss: a selection of his father’s art to be organized for a posthumous exhibition, two hundred acres of trees in a forest stewarded by his father in western Oregon, and his own emotional landscape in the aftermath of his father’s death. As Schlegel moves through these collections of objects and emotions, he learns how to navigate grief. His father’s paintings act as an inventory of the poet’s own life, with each landscape recalling a moment in time, each sketch holding a story. Celebrating a close relationship while mourning its loss, Schlegel reflects on the ties between art and grief, parents and children, people and trees. 

At the time of his father’s death, an extreme heatwave was moving across the region, broadening the scope of grief from the personal and familial to encompass tragedies on a larger scale. Social disintegration and climate disaster weave through the lives of a family in mourning as they navigate the complexity of how to sit with loss, change, love, and art. Through quiet, measured verse and arresting simplicity, Inventory extends the ekphrastic tradition into a contemporary elegy rich in both profound sadness and optimism for the future. 

Rob Schlegel is the author of four previous poetry collections, including, most recently, Childcare. He is the recipient of a James Merrill House Fellowship, and he teaches writing at Whitman College.