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lisawhelpley's review against another edition
3.0
Some of these poems are good - heartbreakingly good.
matthewwester's review against another edition
4.0
The circumstance of this book is heartbreaking -- the poet had lost her son and the poems chronicle the first year of mourning. So unlike most chapbooks, there is a real sense of time's passing between the poems. Throughout the book we are told what month it is, and themes reoccur as they naturally would in grieving. Mary Jo Bang is a talented poet and these are powerful poems. I recommend it, good read.
raloveridge's review against another edition
3.0
Read this for class; I liked it, but I do think it's an uneven collection. A good exercise in avoiding sentimentality, but I could've done with a tad more sentiment.
ausma23's review against another edition
5.0
In Elegy, Mary Jo Bang paces around that gaping, cavernous hole left by grief that Edna St. Vincent Millay wrote about: “Where you used to be, there is a hole in the world, which I find myself constantly walking around in the daytime, and falling in at night.” Bang describes the changed structure of even the most mundane aspects of life in the aftermath of her son’s death, the five stages in rhythmic alliteration, ruing, regretting, trapped in the endless eddies of her grief-induced guilt: “I see you as a grief heat hallucination telling me I could have saved you if I’d been better.” When she exits that cloud of torment and seems to reach acceptance, her words burst forth in a crescendo of love, like the explosion from a dying star, as she describes it in "She Said": "It was as if life were being lived / In the afterglow of a starburst." But this emotional outpouring is no better illustrated than in her magnum opus, “You Were You Are Elegy”:
“This is how I measure
The year. Everything Was My Fault
Has been the theme of the song
I've been singing,
Even when you've told me to quiet.
I haven't been quiet.
I've been crying. I think you
Have forgiven me. You keep
Putting your hand on my shoulder
When I'm crying.
Thank you for that. And
For the ineffable sense
Of continuance. You were. You are
The brightest thing in the shop window
And the most beautiful seldom I ever saw.”
Bang captures the shell shock of finding oneself in an entirely new and foreign world where simultaneously everything, everything, still reminds you of the dearly departed. There is that wandering sense that they are not truly gone from this place, just misplaced, hidden, somewhere behind a veil you can’t penetrate. Her words bargain with themselves as she tries to reconcile this ultimately irreconcilable absence: "It begins to sink in. Dead / Is dead, not just not / Here."
This collection summoned the devastation I felt in the days and weeks and months after my mother's death to the point where I could feel the physical sensation of that same dread — the heavy heart, like an anvil on or inside my chest — in Bang's vivid words like muscle memory. Yet I also took so much comfort in being able to relate to her pain and her attempts at reconciliation and self-forgiveness. Most of all, though, I was comforted by her acknowledgement that this wound can never be healed, only accepted: "You are reduced / To the after-sorrow / That will last my lifetime." Memory alone will have to sustain us.
“This is how I measure
The year. Everything Was My Fault
Has been the theme of the song
I've been singing,
Even when you've told me to quiet.
I haven't been quiet.
I've been crying. I think you
Have forgiven me. You keep
Putting your hand on my shoulder
When I'm crying.
Thank you for that. And
For the ineffable sense
Of continuance. You were. You are
The brightest thing in the shop window
And the most beautiful seldom I ever saw.”
Bang captures the shell shock of finding oneself in an entirely new and foreign world where simultaneously everything, everything, still reminds you of the dearly departed. There is that wandering sense that they are not truly gone from this place, just misplaced, hidden, somewhere behind a veil you can’t penetrate. Her words bargain with themselves as she tries to reconcile this ultimately irreconcilable absence: "It begins to sink in. Dead / Is dead, not just not / Here."
This collection summoned the devastation I felt in the days and weeks and months after my mother's death to the point where I could feel the physical sensation of that same dread — the heavy heart, like an anvil on or inside my chest — in Bang's vivid words like muscle memory. Yet I also took so much comfort in being able to relate to her pain and her attempts at reconciliation and self-forgiveness. Most of all, though, I was comforted by her acknowledgement that this wound can never be healed, only accepted: "You are reduced / To the after-sorrow / That will last my lifetime." Memory alone will have to sustain us.
robinbsmith's review against another edition
5.0
I would give this six stars, maybe seven or eight.
Elegy made me burst into tears, literally, repeatedly. It is lyrical grief in 64 parts, properly voiced in silent sobbing. I cried to ecstatic euphoria. Accuracy and precision do not encompass the profound power of these poems. This is not empathy but pure recogniton transmitted, broadcast, inspired. I have lived a miniature lifetime of her sorrow, felt as my own. I have now lived my own future sorrow in prescience aided by Mary Jo Bang, my Virgil. If catharsis is anywhere, it is here.
"The windows of night have been sewn to her eyes."
Elegy made me burst into tears, literally, repeatedly. It is lyrical grief in 64 parts, properly voiced in silent sobbing. I cried to ecstatic euphoria. Accuracy and precision do not encompass the profound power of these poems. This is not empathy but pure recogniton transmitted, broadcast, inspired. I have lived a miniature lifetime of her sorrow, felt as my own. I have now lived my own future sorrow in prescience aided by Mary Jo Bang, my Virgil. If catharsis is anywhere, it is here.
"The windows of night have been sewn to her eyes."
hanamarma's review against another edition
5.0
Every one of these poems is a precise stitching of language and intensity. They gut me, hallow me, and release my soul to live. They question the absurd uncertainty of existence, the long and ever-evaporating now.
aniss's review against another edition
3.0
poems about the unexpected death of her son that work together to form a tangible image of a mother's grief.
xterminal's review
3.0
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. ***
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. ***
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