Reviews of Elegy

*Named One of Publishers Weekly's Best Books of 2007*

“[A] powerful fifth collection. . . 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.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“Bang’s genius in Elegy is that she never sentimentalizes … Instead, she chooses to present the fragments that profound grief has given her. . . [and] the comfort of the collection is equally profound.” —St. Louis Dispatch

“Mary Jo Bang’s remarkable elegies recall the late work of Ingeborg Bachmann—a febrile, recursive lyricism. Like Nietzsche 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

“These poems (elegies) are written under the sign of Necessity. They exist because they have to exist. This means they are still burning from the forge, carry pain that is radiant, and cut a guiding path for the reader. Because she is already, before the hour of necessity, a serious and accomplished poet, all that she knows comes to her aid and has the kindness to make these poems great.” —Fanny Howe, citation for the 2005 Alice Fay di Castagnola Award of the Poetry Society of America

“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. “There is no waking from death,” Bang writes, and yet each of these poems is fully alive.” —Nick Flynn

“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 inexhaustible / 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. 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

“Had the jacket not said Elegy chronicles the year following the death of her son, Bang’s book would still move you for its grace, not its real-life poignancy.” —Ken Tucker. Entertainment Weekly

“Some poetry collections, when read, defy the written word; instead they paint a world of their own, using images as a paintbrush on the canvas, the reader’s mind. Elegy: Poems by Mary Jo Bang did just that for this reader.” —Ann Hite, Feminist Review

“Eschewing self-pity, false comfort, or blame, Elegy burns with the power of heartbreak and the timelessness of memory.” —The Midwest Book Review

“This is a book of exceptional grace and strength; it belongs in every library. Highly recommended.” —Susan Rich, Library Journal

“Bang offers, if not hope, a kind of keeping company, a way, however painful, to go on.” —Publishers Weekly