Customer Reviews

Elegy: Poems

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

The fifth collection of poetry by Professor of English Mary Jo Bang, Elegy uses free verse to communicate the loss of an only child in the prime of life. Eschewing self-pity, false comfort, or blame, Elegy burns with the power of heartbreak and the timelessness of memory. Highly recommended. "How Beautiful": A personal lens: glass bending rays / That gave one that day's news / Saying each and every day, // Just remember you are standing / On a planet that's evolving. / How beautiful, she thought, what distance does // For water, the view from above or afar. / In last night's dream, they were back again / At the beginning. She was a child // And he was a child. / A plane lit down and left her there. / Cold whitening the white sky whiter. // Then a scalpel cut her open for all the world / To be a sea.

Mary Jo Bang, Elegy (Graywolf, 2007)

Book-length collections that revolve around a single theme tend to work less well than those that range all over the map. There are any number of reasons for this, but the main one is that most poets just don't produce enough material over a protracted period of time about the same thing to make it work. This is why, when a book does get it right, it's such a brilliant reminder of how good such things can be (the obvious example, to my mind, is Donald Hall's Without, which traverses much the same ground Elegy does). When a book fails to do so, on the other hand, that doesn't mean in any way that it's as bad as the successes are good; much of the time it just means that the quality of the poems varies a bit more than one would like to see in a single-author poetry collection. Elegy is one of those books, with poems ranging from the blindingly brilliant to the quotidian. There's nothing here that's bad, some pieces just suffer in relation to others.

"A caboose climbing an emerald hill.
Daily we tend the garden.
Daily we wave

Our lashes like little flags
In a cordial wind. I? Who isn't
Ever I in a circular now."
("We Are Only Human")

Compare and contrast to:

"How could I have failed you like this?
The narrator asks

The object. The object is a box
Of ashes. How could I not have saved you,

A boy made of bone and blood."
("Landscape with the Fall of Icarus")

It all works, some just works better than the rest. Give it a look if you see it at the store. ***

This author uniquely captures the essence of losing a close loved one. She evokes the details of the feelings honestly and gracefully without letting them overwhelm. I heartily recommend this book to one and all, as we all must deal with death at different times of our lives. Mary Jo Bang is first-rate, I may be looking for more of her work in the future.

A moving series of poems that is so very personal to the author yet so universal to every reader that has suffered the loss of a loved one.

"You are now/ only an aspect of my brain. My eyes/ see you. The Balance of what you are// And what you do- the syntax/ of inaction versus the syntax/ Of deliberate action." - p. 29 Extracted from Bang's stunning anthology on loss. Subtle, immaculate, & comprehensive. Everything about Bang's language is clean like an autopsy room. This is how the dead washes the soul of the living. Her poems read like sorrow sanitized by the seasons, by September & November, and inescapable injury of January. Beautiful and austere. How does one die of an accidental overdose of prescription drugs? How does one begin to express a voice that transcends drainage. "Your head the scene of a wonderful theater/ of the most tender gray of the fog/ that joins the sky to the earth./ A tangling of truth and memory." p. 20 I have fallen in love with Bang's astringent dialogue on sorrow. There is also something commanding about her simple vernacular. Something commanding about her sorrow. What a lovely fifth book; my first exposure.

I didn't enjoy this book, and I was excited to read it. It had gotten a great review, but I cannot agree with that reviewer. Maybe I enjoy more traditional poetry. I know she wrote it about her deceased son, but only a few poems seemed to be "talking" to him, or about him.

I love these dark brooding pain addled poems. Art should illuminate the human condition, it is in the illumination that the experience painful or pleasant is transcended.

I was a little distracted by the punctuation I would have chosen to do it differently as it is somewhere between contemporary and post modern style punctuation and maybe it should be decisively one or the other.

This is a beautiful book of poems written by a Mom who lost her only
son through the use of drugs. It is very personal and important
reading for those of us who have lost children. Mary Jo Bang was very
brave for writing this book and I thank her for that. Leona Ciptak