Dance of Death

Gemma Files is a Toronto-based freelance writer.

Church walls all over Europe tell the same story—a musical skeleton,
noseless and gleeful in its few remaining rags of flesh, leading an
unwilling conga line of victims away from it all. This pageant is the
medieval Danse Macabre, the Dance of Death. It is the ultimate
demonstration of mortality as a leveller, unimpressed by age, sex,
class, or accomplishment.

Pond uses the Dance as both the inspiration for, and the structure of,
her newest book. Framing her own deceptively conversational, yet
perfectly phrased, poems between brutally explicit translations of its
original verses, Pond explores and contrasts the many popular images of
death. The oddly chipper, rotting dandy of 1492 (when a starving
Scotsman named Maccaber first put together the Dance that now bears his
name) goes toe bone to toe bone with the cold, clean reality of modern
“death with dignity.” Although it’s a fair fight, Pond’s talent
is the hands-down winner. Death, she says, is a “rickety bone
lesson,” a “coy memento mori grin,” “a small white room in the
middle of winter,” and finally, “the one no-one can name or show.”
Readers will be pleasantly unsurprised to see just how close she comes
to doing both.