Kathy Pimlott’s After the Rites and Sandwiches: Poems is a meditation on absence that carries the weight of both the infinite and the everyday. This pamphlet, her third, takes us through the aftermath of an accidental death—a sudden severing that leaves nothing untouched. It’s a journey through the violent, the mundane, and the quietly absurd elements of grief, and it moves with a kind of stillness that is both disorienting and tender.

The collection unfolds like a kind of uninvited ritual. Pimlott writes from the heart of a city—London, a place that, despite its sprawl and noise, doesn’t offer much comfort in moments of private catastrophe. And yet, the city does not stop. The moths continue to circle the lights, Christmas rises and falls, and life proceeds with its usual indifference. In the wake of loss, time becomes an unreliable companion. There is a strange dissonance in Pimlott’s poetry, a tension between the world’s movement and the rupture that the death of a partner creates in her life.

Grief, Pimlott suggests, is not just an emotional thing. It’s the slow creep of tasks that seem too small to be monumental but, when piled together, grow into a mountain of absence. The sorting of belongings. The piles of paperwork. The phone calls. The quiet absurdity of facing life without a person who was once integral to it. And yet, amidst all this, there is an unexpected humour—a dry, wry acknowledgment that sometimes the banality of living without someone is as much a part of grief as the tears. The poems do not shy away from the mundane: they look it square in the eye and find a kind of painful recognition there. Grief, Pimlott seems to say, is not only the dramatic; it is also the unsung act of just getting through.

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Kathy Pimlott, in her delicate, piercing way, shows us how we live with what is lost

But perhaps what makes this pamphlet so compelling, so resonant, is its refusal to tie grief into neat packages. It’s not about moving on—there’s no neat resolution here. Instead, we follow Pimlott through a quieter process: moving through. The poems take us by the hand and lead us through the days, weeks, and months where the world continues as if nothing has happened. The grief is not just something to be overcome but something to be lived with, examined, turned over, and spoken into being.

This is what makes Pimlott’s voice so distinctive. There is no grand attempt to offer catharsis, no neat wrapping up of the experience of loss. Instead, there is a quiet recognition of how grief, when it enters our lives, changes everything. It dissects not only the obvious emotional chasm but also the barely spoken, in-between spaces where the human experience becomes sharper, more fragile. The mundane becomes sacred in its repetition. The things left undone become just as important as those left to be said.

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It’s not about moving on—there’s no neat resolution here. Instead, we follow Pimlott through a quieter process: moving through

The collection’s language—soft yet unyielding, tender yet direct—reads almost like a letter to the self, an intimate, often uncomfortable dialogue with what it means to be human in the face of loss. Pimlott does not shield us from the harshness, but neither does she dwell in it. She offers instead a quiet, nuanced exploration of grief’s various layers: the loss, the quiet absurdities, the unexpected humour, the private rituals that form in the absence of a person who once was.

After the Rites and Sandwiches: Poems is not just a book about grief. It is a book about how life continues, how we continue, even in the face of the most insurmountable things. It is a record of the things we must carry with us—not because they ever go away, but because we somehow learn to bear them. This is a collection that speaks to the complexity of survival. It is a moving reminder that we do not heal from grief, we simply learn how to move through it.

Kathy Pimlott, in her delicate, piercing way, shows us how we live with what is lost. How we learn to live despite it.