Elegy: Poems

Mary Jo Bang has done the impossible here. She has written about the deepest form of grief (the loss of a child) in this collection of poems and she has transformed it into unforgettable, poignant art. Beautiful and heartbreaking elegies from an exquisite poet.

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

Love Mary Jo Bang. Love these deeply moving poems. The exploration into the loss of her son is extraordinary. Highly recommended.

........so I picked it up and bought it. No joke - I was reading a collection of A. R. Ammons poems when this book pushed it's way out off the bookshelf and fell at my feet. At first I thought it to be one of the 1000 Dunio Elegies editions by Rilke. This is something special all to itself. And I'm glad it did cause it's a wonderful collection of poems which revolve around the theme of Ms Bang's son's death. Indirectly yet poignantly. At times gently, others uncomfortably. There is no criticism here, just allow four stanzas from four of the sixty poems to tell you about itself. A PLACE He'd already slid. Into the state of wishing To be all he had been which was now but a blur Haze on the way to becoming a star. DON'T Dreamland kept getting larger. It expanded To embrace both time and timelessness One minute left on the steps and told to be still Another minute sent to a misaligned elsewhere. TRAGEDY It begins to sink in. Dead Is dead, not just not Here, the knife never dulls, Does it, dearie On the blade side. ROLE OF ELEGY The role of elegy is To put a death mask on tragedy A drape on the mirror. ....to rebreathe life Into what the gone one once was Before he grew to enormity.

"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.

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.

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.

This personal revelation of the deep and fracturing grief of loss exemplifies how we, as humans, attempt to process and move through it...how we try to come to terms with our role in someone's death, when in actual fact, we had nothing at all to do with it. Mary Jo Bang speaks to and through us all...