There is a moment in Max Porter’s remarkable meditation on grief, family and poetry where a crow mischievously beckons two small boys into their father’s room, telling them that their dad seems to be dead. There are ashtrays on the duvet and his mouth is “collapsed like a failed Yorkshire pudding”. “Dad, are you dead?” frets one of the boys, who have already lost their mother. “Dad, are you dead?” The answer comes in the negative, with a “long, whining fart”.

This tiny exchange sums up Grief Is the Thing With Feathers: it is heartbreaking, sour, magical and blackly comic. Profound, too, although when it was published in hardback last year there were as many comments on its literary playfulness as its power to move. Understandably so – the title is a reference to the Emily Dickinson poem Hope Is the Thing With Feathers, and the father is trying to write a book about Ted Hughes when a crow straight from the poet’s career-defining collection literally knocks him off his feet.

But for all its clever conceits, this slim novel (128 pages) also manages to strike at the heart of how precious and fleeting love can be. Two young boys and their father are grappling with the unbearable emptiness caused by their mother’s sudden death, and as Dad navigates the “organisational fakery” of his days he is visited by Crow, equal parts babysitter, philosopher and therapist. “I won’t leave until you don’t need me any more,” he says.

As he stays, Crow’s earthy explorations into the family’s grief take on the form of a prose poem. He weighs up gouging out Dad’s eyeball for fun or mercy, but settles for leaving him a feather. But these often visceral diversions aren’t just a metaphor for an author battling to write about love and loss. They also provide a pleasing antidote to any sentimentality.

Dad is something of a battered romantic, but just as he finally finds some way of describing his grief – “I miss her so much it is a thousand trees, a lake, nine thousand buses, a million cars, twenty million birds and more” – Crow shoots him down: “Eugh… you sound like a fridge magnet.” The boys remark that their best way of loving him and thanking him is to “take the piss out of him as hard as we possibly could”.

It’s this fine balancing act of fable and family drama that Porter handles so well. Grief Is The Thing With Feathers might only take 45 minutes to read, but its sentiments endure. Much, indeed, like grief itself.

Grief Is the Thing With Feathers is published by Faber (£7.99). Click here to buy it for £6.55