**WINNER OF THE 2007 NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD**
**
A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK**
**PUBLISHERS WEEKLY BEST BOOK OF 2007**
“A work of startling breadth, one that explores what is
essential to all losses.”
—PHILADELPHIA INQUIRER
“[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… Bang offers, if not hope, a kind of keeping company, a
way, however painful, to go on.”
—PUBLISHERS WEEKLY, starred review
“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.”
—ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY
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
“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
“Eschewing self-pity, false comfort, or blame, Elegy burns with the power of heartbreak
and the timelessness of memory.”
—THE MIDWEST BOOK REVIEW
“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.”
