Elegy Poems Author:Mary Jo Bang The winner of the 2007 National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry, and a 2008 New York Times Notable Book — Look at her?It?s as if — The windows of night have been sewn to her eyes. — ?from ?Ode to History? Mary Jo Bang is the author of four p... more »revious books of poetry, including Louise in Love and The Eye Like a Strange Balloon. She lives in St. Louis, Missouri, where she is a Professor of English and Director of the Creative Writing Program at Washington University. Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award Mary Jo Bang's fifth collection, Elegy, chronicles the year following the death of her son. By weaving the particulars of her own loss into a tapestry that also contains the elements common to all losses, Bang creates something far larger than a mere lament. Continually in search of an adequate metaphor for the most profound and private grief, the poems in Elegy confront, in stark terms and with a resilient voice, how memory haunts the living and brings the dead back to life. Within these intimate and personal poems is a persistently urgent, and deeply touching, examination of grief itself. "The loss of a child?especially an only child who is in the prime of life?is one of the most painful experiences anyone can have and one, common sense tells us, almost impossible to render in an age of sensory overload. But Mary Jo Bang's Elegy is the grand exception. In its insistence on 'the inexhaustive / Need to be accurate.' Elegy is wholly absorbing. Avoiding all self-pity, false comfort, sentimentality or finger pointing, Bang's terse, oblique poems anatomize grief, guilt, and mourning in pitiless detail. Do things 'improve' by the end of the year whose progress this heartbreaking book charts? Not really, but the reader is transformed. I know of no contemporary elegy that has its power."?Marjorie Perloff "The palette is drained; the weather chilled. The tone is formal, the voice even; the feeling is scoured out. This is where time stops, breath stops. Every word stands naked, stands alone, facing a door, an opening. 'Wonderful/Awful.' This is where time stops, breath stops. Words are chosen and framed and hung because they must be, not because they make an unbearable loss one whit more bearable, but they position us a step closer to seeing the beginning (of love) and the end (of life). Something. 'Ancient and every and over.' This is our beautiful glimpse of forever. Mary Jo Bang's Elegy is a harrowing, necessary work."?C.D. Wright "Mary Jo Bang's remarkable elegies recall the late work of Ingeborg Bachmann?a febrile, recursive lyricism. Like Nietzsce or Plath, Bang flouts naysayers; luridly alive, she drives deep into aporia, her new sad country. Her stanzas, sometimes spilling, sometimes severe, perform an uncanny death-song, recklessly extended?nearly to the breaking point."?Wayne Koestenbaum "Perhaps everyone has a story that could break your heart?the poems that make up Elegy break mine. These poems are astonishing?here is fierce, controlled abandon, here is one of our finest poets utterly in the moment, yet the moment is unbearable. 'Theirs is no waking from death,' bang writes, and yet each of these poems is fully alive."?Nick Flynn "In her powerful fifth collection, Bang asks, What is elegy but the attempt / To rebreathe life/ Into what the gone one once was. Writing to mourn the death of her adult son, Bang interrogates the elegiac form and demands of it more than it can give, frustrated, over and over again, with memory, which falls pitifully short of life: Memory is deeply not alive; it's a mock-up/ And this renders it hateful. The urgent line breaks of Bang's fractured sentences build their own drama, as if her precisions might determine whether or not she will cross the fissures between what she wants to say and what she can't. Aware that there is no vocabulary equal to conveying the pain of losing a loved one or the struggle to be faithful to the loss, the poet ruefully admits, That's where things went wrong./ Is went into language. Plumbing a world made strange by grief means forsaking the mundane; as a result, there are only a few everyday objects in these poems?an overcoat,roller-skates and Phenobarbital pills. Ostensibly a linear account of a year of sorrow, the structure of the collection suggests rather that grief might be crystalline, the poems accruing around a memory that won't move on: I say Come Back and you do/ Not do what I want. While the poet must write and rewrite in order to get her subject right, the mother of a dead child writes to fill the a bottomless chasm.Like Joan Didion in The Year of Magical Thinking, Bang finds no easy consolation, and there is pain for the reader here, too, as when, toward the end of the collection, Bang writes, Everything Was My Fault / Has been the theme of the song. Calling to mind Sharon Olds's The Father and Donald Hall's Without, two other harrowing contemporary book-length poetic studies of loss, Bang offers, if not hope, a kind of keeping company, a way, however painful, to go on: Otherwise no longer exists./ There is only stasis, continually/ Granting ceremony to the moment."?Publishers Weekly (starred review) « less
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