Poet, musician, and writer Charles Coe died late last year at age 73. The Boston Globe reported that, with an economy of words, Coe "wrote poems that told vast stories, and he filled prose essays with passages that could enliven any verse. An accomplished musician and chef as well, he wrote and performed songs and prepared meals that were a chorus of tastes."
Coe published poetry collections, fiction, and essays. He taught writing at Salve Regina University in Newport, R.I., and in Dingle, Ireland, for Bay Path University. He also served as a City of Boston artist-in-residence and as a Boston Public Library Literary Light. In addition, he had co-chaired the Boston chapter of the National Writers Union and been a visiting poet in area schools.
Coe "was kind of plainspoken and used language that everyone can relate to, to create something really extraordinary--that's a gift,'' said Ann Hood, the author and founding director of the Newport MFA in creative writing at Salve Regina. In person, he was "all about leading with your heart. I don't think I've known anyone who was, at the same time, nobody's fool but so openhearted that he just observed everything from the point of view of caring about people.''
In 2013, he published the poetry collection All Sins Forgiven: Poems for my Parents. "The title is about me making peace with many of the feelings adult children have when they look back on their lives,'' he said in a 2013 Globe interview. "Dad died eight years ago, then mom, and my one sister, three years older, after that. So, there's no one I can sit around my kitchen table with and say, 'Hey, do you remember when?' ''
Coe published five volumes of poetry and a novella. "His 2013 collection about grief, sense of place and mortality was titled Memento Mori, loosely translated from Latin as 'remember that you must die.' He was working on a family memoir inspired by his sister's death after a protracted battle with liver cancer, and had several screenplays in progress," Cambridge Day noted. Charles Coe: New and Selected Works (2024) is available from Leapfrog Press.
"The guy was on fire,'' said Roberto Mighty, a filmmaker, educator, and musician who made a documentary, Charles Coe: Man of Letters, about him. "He did not expect to die. He was incredibly ambitious, and he was working very hard, which is something I admired greatly."
Brookline Booksmith, Brookline, Mass., posted on social media: "We mourn the loss of poet, musician, and storyteller Charles Coe, a gentle giant of the Boston literary community. Kind, clever, ever-curious, he was an ardent advocate of the arts and a beloved member of the Boston poetry scene and beyond.... Charles's work is a powerful talisman to carry with us through grief, through difficulty, and through change. He was a writer who reminded us not only of the essential power of resistance but also of small joys, the precious things in life that make this world and the people in it worth loving and fighting for."
"No stranger to profound loss and the deaths of those he loved," Coe "captured the experience of walking along mourning's unstable path in his poem 'The Geology of Grief,' " the Globe noted. The poem included the lines:
We climb from the wreckage,
toss our useless maps aside and explore
the new landscape on feet forevermore
denied the illusion of solid ground.
