Review by New York Times Review
Mary Jo Bang's new poems grapple with the death of her son. "THE art of losing isn't hard to master," Elizabeth Bishop tells us and yet artistry can often seem the least appropriate response to the misery of loss. When pain is primitive and specific, as it is after the death of a loved one, then we don't want an exquisite performance filled with grand abstractions. What we want is to go beyond art, beyond society and beyond speech itself, as Lear does when he enters carrying the body of his daughter and crying, "Howl howl howl howl!" We want heaven's vault to crack. We want the veil parted and the bone laid bare. This is what Tennyson meant when he wrote in Canto 54 of "In Memoriam," his tribute to his friend Arthur Hallam, that his grief left him "no language but a cry." Still, "In Memoriam" is over 1,000 lines long, which is a lot of language any way you slice it. This points toward one of the central paradoxes of the modern private elegy. The closer a poet is to the subject he elegizes, the more we expect him to respond in ways that aren't "poetic" but it takes craft to make a poem seem uncrafted, and it takes words to show how short our words can fall. As a result, the elegist is forced to go through increasingly complicated contortions in order to sound sufficiently simple. He finds himself in the awkward position of orchestrating a death wail. Now, one might respond that many (too many) poems meditate on the limits of speech, and that would be true. But it's equally true that nobody reads a poem about Lacanian theory the same way one reads a poem about the poet's dead child. Any elegist must confront this fact. That confrontation can be especially problematic for a certain type of contemporary poet. Stevens accused Frost of writing about "subjects," to which Frost retorted that Stevens wrote about "bricabrac." The dominant contemporary American style, with its selfconscious intellectualism, evasiveness and preoccupation with "language itself" is firmly on the side of bricabrac. This style, like all styles, may be put to any use, but it will always approach its goals through the backdoor via head fakes, double bluffs, rope tricks and an elaborate system of pulleys. It's a strategy poorly suited to "subjects" in general, let alone the intractable subject that haunts an elegy. But the best stylists thrive when challenged. This is perhaps why Mary Jo Bang largely succeeds in her new book of elegies for her son, called, simply enough, "Elegy." Bang's previous four collections are polished and frequently interesting, but they also contain more than their share of overwrought and overthought poetry about poetry. Sure, a poem might be called "Open Heart Surgery," but by Line 14 we'd discover that "all the while, the ghost of Gertrude Stein/was whispering in my ear." Bang's last book, "The Eye Like a Strange Balloon," consisted entirely of poems about other works of art ("Always asking, has this this been built/Or is it all process?"), which for a bricabrac poet is the equivalent of a Wes Anderson movie about a troop of overgrown adolescents who collect meerschaum pipes and have mommy issues in other words, pretty much what you'd expect. That can't be said of "Elegy." This is a tightly focused, completely forthright collection written almost entirely in the bleakest key imaginable. The poems aren't all great, some of them aren't even good, but collectively they are overwhelming which is both a compliment to Bang's talent and to the toughness of mind that allowed her to attempt this difficult project in the first place. Like "In Memoriam," the book is a roughly chronological account of the poet's mourning. The poems return repeatedly to two related themes: the connection between grieving and the perception of time ("Small cog after cog slips into the hour/And razor thin minute slot without stop") and the idea of elegy as theater ("Come on stage and be yourself,/The elegist says to the dead"). Bang's technique here doesn't depart much from the technique of her previous work she favors orderly free verse stanzas animated by conspicuous enjambment ("November is more of the usual/November"), clots of assonance and alliteration ("The knife never dulls,/ Does it, Dearie,/ on the blade side") and peculiar syntactic units ("How very gone/The nothing after"). But that technique is now at the service of a much richer and darker purpose. Consider the end of "Three Trees," in which Bang's fondness for writing about art in this case, the animated movie "Jimmy Neutron: Boy Genius" leads to an unexpectedly raw note: The poet doubts the redemptive power of her own gift while simultaneously using it to find a tone that in the final line wavers perfectly between her contempt for consolation and her desire for it. The achievement of art shows the limitation of art, and vice versa. This is the great strength of "Elegy." No one will ever bring back the dead by writing poetry; indeed, the only certain result of writing a poem is the poem itself. But as Bang proves in this sad, strange book, the conversion of grief into art may be balanced, if not redeemed, by the transformation of art into grieving. David Orr writes the On Poetry column for the Book Review.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [October 27, 2009]
Review by Booklist Review
To mourn the dead is the impetus of art, the soul of poetry. In poems written during the year following her son's death, Bang tears asunder and reassembles the elegy, an ancient vessel, infusing it with feelings pure, piercing, and cauterizing. Each word is a needle, each line a stitch across a gaping wound. Each poem postulates a stark equation measuring guilt, rage, and agony over the shock of losing the missing. In previous collections, Bang has distinguished herself as witty and intrepid. Here, all falls away, and what is left is the bone of pain. Meter itself is halt, stunned. But beauty will not be exiled, strength recalibrates, and poem by poem, the frozen, silent, monochrome world of grief slowly thaws. Bang's imagery gains vitality and color, twigs put out leaves, syntax attains complexity ( Decisionless and dull, I am one / In a glitter-knitted metallica sky ), yet there is no easy fix. One hears repeatedly, the role of elegy is, / And then there's a blank. And then there are Bang's poems, filling the void.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2007 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Like Joan Didion in The Year of Magical Thinking, Bang finds no easy consolation, and there is pain for the reader here, too, as when, toward the end of the collection, Bang writes, "Everything Was My Fault / Has been the theme of the song." Calling to mind Sharon Olds's The Father and Donald Hall's Without, two other harrowing contemporary book-length poetic studies of loss, Bang offers, if not hope, a kind of keeping company, a way, however painful, to go on: "Otherwise no longer exists./ There is only stasis, continually/ Granting ceremony to the moment." (Oct.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
So many authors writing about a child's death deliver the raw material, as if that were enough. Bang's beautifully compassed work is instead transformative, turning anguish into genuine poetry. A stunning and heartfelt read; this year's National Book Critics Circle award winner. (LJ 1/08) (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
