The Pilot Star Elegies: Poems [Hardcover]

Sherod Santos (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 1, 1999

The centerpiece of this collection, "Elegy for My Sister", is a sequence of poems on the suicide of the poet's sister in which he gathers, piece by piece, the scattered fragments of his sister's life. In other poems, Santos follows this elegiac theme into the broader contexts of myth and contemporary history to explore the ways each private loss is overlaid by those harrowing conditions by which our century defines itself.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

As its title suggests, Sherod Santos's fourth collection is a kind of prayer for the dying, in which the poet attempts to notate "that earth-bound, raw, quicksilvered weight / a life takes on in that moment it ceases to be a life." Resurrecting any life in the clunky and uncooperative medium of language is a challenge that regularly topples even the finest poets. It's no surprise, then, that The Pilot Star Elegies is something of a mixed bag. A poem like "The Story," in which Santos (literally) takes a leaf from Yaffa Eliach's Hasidic Tales of the Holocaust, seems flat and prosaic--and his invocation of the death camps has a prefabricated feel to it, though he can hardly be accused of sensationalism. A long, elegiac sequence for his sister, a suicide, is more successful, as the poet tries to puzzle out not only the enigma of her death but of her life, too:

Who was she whose death now made her
a stranger to me? As though the problem
were not that she had died, and how was I
to mourn her, but that some stalled memory
now kept her from existing, and that she
could only begin to exist, to take her place
in the future, when all of our presuppositions
about her, all of those things that identified
the woman we'd buried, were finally swept aside.

Santos's epistemological agonies recall those of C.K. Williams, whose elegy for Paul Zweig found him twisting in the same melancholic wind. Yet even here, a good deal of the language seems insufficiently quickened into poetry. Perhaps he means to avoid bathos by tamping down his rhetoric, and the impulse is a laudable one. But for this reader, anyway, some of the finest and most persuasive work in The Pilot Star Elegies occurs in the relatively lightweight lyrics. What other poet has ever gotten such mileage from an upended sea turtle, which some indifferent beachcomber has staked to the sand "with a length of broom- / stick and baling wire"?

Now anchored to the earth,
it founders in the slipstream
of a mild, inverted sea,

and labors toward it still, its little
destiny undisturbed by acts
of forgiveness or contrition.

It may seem mildly blasphemous to stack up the sea turtle's death against the Holocaust--and to find the former a more poignant occasion for poetry. But Santos himself notes that stories come to us as if predestined: that the ones "which we need most / choose us and not the other way around." So the turtle chose him, and it's not the poet's fault that he so excelled at this particular shell game. --James Marcus

From Publishers Weekly

Though the rhythms of this masterfully constructed collection are not borne always on the "black-flagged quinquereme" of the pentameter, the narrative impulse suggested by its ghostly footfall is everywhere in evidence. In elegies for a student lost to AIDS; for the poet M.L. Rosenthal; and for a sister who has committed suicide, Santos (City of Women; The Southern Reaches) refuses to leave his subjects "storyless, boundless, and blank," seeking them with poignancy and steadiness of gaze, and without the epitaph-writer's pretense of grave authority. His emotions are most obviously addled in the 25 poems of "Elegy for My Sister" that constitute the core?though not the cream?of the collection. The sequence attempts to sort the poet's "deliberate confusions" about the troubled life of his sister whose death frees her "from the raveling constraints of what no longer is." The other series of this fourth collection, "Of Haloes & Saintly Aspect," connects its component poems more mysteriously and perhaps more tenuously: the snarling voice of Rimbaud asserts that "I'll get mine/ when that death's-head called Posterity scrawls/ my epitaph"; a Post Dispatch reporter attempts to render in her journalistic way the accidental drowning of a young girl who's been catching minnows in the river; a moribund sea turtle strains through its last moments with "its little/ destiny undisturbed by acts of forgiveness or contrition." Throughout, however, Santos mourns with irony and accuracy ("Her hands were folded peacefully on her chest; her nails were done up tastefully"), and is undeterred in searching out "that earth-bound, raw, quicksilvered weight/ a life takes on in that moment it ceases to be a life."
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 96 pages
• Publisher: W W Norton & Co Inc; 1st edition (February 1, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0393047040
• ISBN-13: 978-0393047042
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.8 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.6 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,450,794 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Heartbreakingly beautiful, honest, and profound!, September 7, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: The Pilot Star Elegies: Poems (Hardcover)

I can think of no other book -- poetry or prose -- which comes closer to understanding the tragedy of suicide.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Beautiful and Intense, May 14, 2004

By 

SG (Columbia, MO United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Pilot Star Elegies: Poems (Hardcover)

This is one of the books I return to most often--it's not the least bit sentimental. On the contrary, it's the book's tough-mindedness that makes it a true accomplishment, one that is sure to last through generations of readers.

5 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Tired Poetry, July 19, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: The Pilot Star Elegies: Poems (Hardcover)

Eventually, the world will tire of academic poets who write for other academic poets. Yes this book is full of literary grace, but it is void of life. Mr. Santos is a poet, but that doesn't mean that he is qualified to write poetry. This book of poems makes me tired, makes me want to sleep, makes me want to drink. Makes me want to go out and find some real poetry...away from the walled confines of academia. There is so much good poetry out there today. Look elsewhere my friends.