Elegy

“[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)

“The loss of a child—especially an only child who is in the prime of life—is one of he 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

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 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