Fierce Elegy

by Peter Gizzi

Peter Gizzi's powerful new collection reminds us that the elegy is lament but also―as it has been for centuries―a work of love

Peter Gizzi has said that "the elegy is a mode that can transform a broken heart in a fierce world into a fierce heart in a broken world." For Gizzi, ferocity can be reimagined as vulnerability, bravery and discovery, a braiding of emotional and otherworldly depth, "a holding open." In Gizzi's voice joy and sorrow make a complex ecosystem. In their quest for a lyric reality, these poems remind us that elegy is lament but also―as it has been for centuries―a work of love. "This new poetry," Kamau Brathwaite has written about Gizzi, "taking such care of temperature―the time & details of the world―meaning the space(s) in which we live―defining love in this way. Writing along the edge. A way of writing about hope."

Genres: Poetry

Paperback

Published January 1, 2024

About the author

Educated at New York University, Brown University, and the State University of New York at Buffalo, poet Peter Gizzi is the author of several collections of poetry, including Threshold Songs (2011), The Outernationale (2007), and Artificial Heart (1998).

Gizzi uses both narrative and lyrical gestures to engage and question distance and light in his search for the unmapped. Reflecting on the question of whether his work is narrative or lyric, Gizzi stated in an interview with Poetry Daily, “I think I am a narrative poet—I’m just narrating my bewilderment as a citizen.”

(Source: Peter Gizzi @ The Poetry Foundation)

Reviews

[Emilie · Rating 2 out of 5]

This feels like the deep poetry you write on the bus home from a night out after you realise maybe brown liquor doesn’t make you horny, like you thought, but rather melancholic and a bit pretentious.

Starting strong, the first poem makes sure we don’t miss the point:

Like when I found you in the back of my mind.
I am talking about people and the night.
People inside the night.
The night and what we are made of.
The things and the people.
The signal and its noise.

Other times I got a little lost:

I was one day. Possible like any. Either faster. There
was one day. From might have been. Were lovely
days. And summer. My birds. Had trusted some.
Was missing some.

Honestly, I’m not sure what to make of this or the several positive reviews. Maybe I’ll come back to it after a drink :)

[Jon Nakapalau · Rating 5 out of 5]

Embracing loss sounds counterproductive; to have to embrace something that one wanted to hold onto is hard to fathom. Yet we will all find ourselves in this position at some point in life (that point growing sharper with age). Peter Gizzi has looked at his in a both challenging and empathetic way; a way that delineates between choice and acceptance.

[Ada · Rating 4 out of 5]

El T.S Eliot d'aquest any és un poemari molt breu, amb alguns poemes de versos d'una o dues paraules. M'ha agradat anar-me trobant formes tan diferents. La brevetat no treu la feina increïble del darrera, les profunditats a les que arriba, els diferents paisatges per on ens guia. Una elegia escrita durant 10 anys que ens arriba ara amb força i amb totes les cares del dol.

[ay · Rating 4 out of 5]

Everyday I want to give this book a different rating. It’s great and I don’t really like it. I love it and can’t remember a thing.

[salva · Rating 4 out of 5]

mmmmm liked his previous books better

[Dawn · Rating 2 out of 5]

I’m sure I must be missing something as I trust the TS Eliot prize but I’ve only just finished this book and already I can hardly remember it? nothing really memorable, hard-hitting or interesting to read and perhaps a little too abstract for my tastes. there were a few poems I enjoyed but most of my appreciation of the writing went to individual lines or ideas, rather than the poems or collection itself. I will be reading more Peter Gizzi though — I feel like this is different from his usual style and I am interested to see his skill in crafting sounds and fragments applied to something that is perhaps a little more my taste.

[Stephen Ramsek · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is lyric poetry done right, no pretenses, showiness, all atmosphere and emotion. It lives up to its title in the best way possible

[juch · Rating 4 out of 5]

Read this aloud taking turns w my classmates in class. Rly beautiful and brave (not afraid of sentiment or cliche). Elemental

[Rudrashree Makwana · Rating 5 out of 5]

The poems are about people, how we perceive the world, seeing life from the soul of a poet, muse, words, haunting memories, love, loss, grief, life, expressing emotions through painting, rebuilding memories, after life, inspiration and going though myriad of emotions throughout the life. Sometimes life feels hollow while sometimes it feels complete and the next second, loneliness consumes it. How we feel lonely being surrounded by people and then darkness consumes us. The poems are deep, evocative, poignant, touching and reaches to the soul.

4.5

Thanks to the Publisher and Author

[Jeff Morgan · Rating 2 out of 5]

I saw where someone (another poet?) identified “Fierce Elegy” as one of the best poetry collections of the year. I spent a chunk of Sunday morning reading the poems aloud to an empty house. I even looked up a few videos of the author reciting poems from this collection.

Unfortunately, this is exactly the poetry that I cannot stand: no attention paid to form or structure, no regard to conventional poetic elements (rhyme, rhythm, clever wordplay), and written in such an esoteric style that it’s nearly impossible to make heads or tails of it.

Obviously, the poet is playing with the idea of an elegy. Elegies are poems of contemplation, usually about the dead. They are laments. These poems are not just lamenting, though. They are also poems about love, death, joy, poetry, and nature . . . but beyond that, I can’t make much sense of any of it.

[Wildhearted_Son · Rating 3 out of 5]

A bit all over the pace - some strong, some weak. A few lines or verses that touch a nerve - but ultimately diluted with the majority

[Chloe Jones · Rating 4 out of 5]

‘but the verb is to be, to be vigilant and hungry across time’

[mary stuart · Rating 5 out of 5]

“are not all the sounds on my lyre about you”

Love lovely lovely! And I read that he teaches for the MFA program at UMASS Amherst! My desire to attend the MFA program there continues growing…

[hannah · Rating 4 out of 5]

“sometimes it’s hard
to know the outline
of a body, there’s
so many people inside.
so much room
for love and mayhem.”

i am a simple woman: give me a poetry collection about elegies of undying love? grief? amidst a broken world? sign. me. up. i am ready to devour it all, and what a delight it was! it’s super short—i read it on the bus like any other pretentious reader and felt satisfied by this wonderful feast. while some poems have faded from memory, there are select ones i want to revisit over and over. i loved the rhythm of each line, it truly felt like elegies but brought me alive with their lyrical beauty, if you get what i mean. but i also understand that each poem strikes you differently, at different moments in your life, and in various ways. i really couldn’t hate a poem—it’s hard to criticize word vomit when it is poured out so gracefully.

the poems i liked:
— consider the wound
— roxy music
— romanticism
— notes on sound and vision
— creeley song

“and in my outrage, i am immortal
because i love—”

????? i’m gagged ?????

i didn’t expect them to approve my request but huge thank you to penguin press uk for this e-arc 🫶🏻

[Jeff · Rating 3 out of 5]

Probably as an after-affect of Donald Justice's having taught there, at Iowa one of the litotes that operated like an admonition that one's parents offer as you walk out the front door for the night was, "obscurity is a trick that will make you famous." This, I believe, was Justice's version of an Yvor Winters warrant, a tool the young Winters used to discriminate image from poeticism: "pseudo-reference." A pseudo-reference was a reference that seems to refer to something in the world, but refers only to the poem. Just so the poem had become a world, where anything was possible. Winters could not disdain more a poem-world in which anything was possible. In turn, Winters was opposing his friend Hart Crane's mystical metonymies. Because they were mystical, force in them vectored between planes of associative substitution, so -- tonally, at least -- there's nothing "witty" in Crane. It was a time period (the Twenties of the 20th Century) when value was intrinsic to understanding what was best in the English poetic tradition, which for T. S. Eliot was, of course, the 17th century (let's not blame Eliot; for Whitehead, during the same decade, what was best in the sciences also came from the 17th century). William Empson's way of describing this was that "atmosphere" resolved ambiguities immanent in the vectoring between associative substitutions. Atmosphere was a word Empson picked up from Riding and Graves' Survey of Modernist Poetry, where it had been used to characterize both textual and lexical niceties understanding ambiguities in their interpretation of Shakespeare's sonnet #129 -- their reading of which Empson was very much in favor. Empson was about to write 7 Types of Ambiguity.

I keep all this context in mind as I read John Steen's blurb for Peter Gizzi's Fierce Elegy that remarks on its difference from "traditions . . . that imagine themselves as wholly anti-elegy." I suppose the sonnet tradition might be one such. When Creeley wrote,

Moon, moon
when you leave me alone,
all the darkness is
an utter blackness,

a pitt of fear,
a stench,
hands unreasonable
never to touch.

we get that the address is to the beloved, in that courtly, first-cited line substituted for by the image of the "Moon," a traditional ecstatic nomenclature. Now, the claim being made for Gizzi's book in the book's apparatus [too much apparatus, candidly], is that the poet has brought a new lexis to the tradition of elegy, one of intensity, spiritual ecstasy. That's the encomium for Gizzi from Catholic (Franny Howe) and secularist (Rae Armantrout) alike. "No ideas but in wounds," "Consider the Wound" begins, "I is that wound," the line continues, and there's the slacker wit in the substitutions that trope Williams. But the atmosphere will support a claim, as good as any in description of the book, that what we've got is a pseudo-reference, whatever we may think of it. What could be more 'calling the exception' than the abject "I is that wound"? Gizzi cops to it. But then reads himself copping to it. Etcetera. To praise this for its genre canniness seems a little extra.

[Goodreeds User · Rating 4 out of 5]

Hmnnnmm yesss... there's a thin line between mysterious and evasive.... hmmm...... between wise and bitter hmmnnnn yesss.... a thin line between loving and grieving..... mmmmnnnn.... a thin line between your mind and the world hmmmmnnn....... between precision and sparseness hmm......... yes...... a very thin line between thought and feeling mmmnnmnmn........ yes........ a thin line between caring and not caring hmmmm....... a thin line...... between composing a poem....... hmmm...... and composing yourself hmmmnnnn yes......... between loving and acting...... between grieving and acting hmmmm..... between acting and feeling hmmnnn yes...... between writing and acting hmnnn....... between writing and lying..... between lying and hiding hmmn...... between hiding and revealing yes...... between revealing and feeling something true.......

[JB · Rating 4 out of 5]

(Some first inroads to reading these poems)

This one begins in a manner worthy of this book's name and purpose -- to create poems (elegies) capable of transform[ing] a broken heart in a fierce world into a fierce heart in a broken world" -- with the lines:

Thus far we have spoken
only the codes,
a litany of survival.
Thus spoke the silvered asphodel
next to the factory ruin. (1)

I love this rhyming -- thematic as well as somehow almost linguistic -- of "survival" and "ruin" as well as the direct thus-ness of a concrete image of asphodel next to the factory (I can almost see it in the paper mills in Holyoke) following the very abstract first three lines. These two sentences, these five lines, really knocked me over, and are again an example of what I find powerful about PG's work when it's at its best -- a sort of seeing philosophical fact, dark feeling, in the light of wood grain... That silvered asphodel is a fierce heart in a broken world, silvered as in the way it shines in flood lamps at night and silvered as in getting older, going gray from the stress of living in a world beneath a "chemical sky" (as he puts it in Now It's Dark) you can't get out from.

It was best to let the moon unravel
and focus the truth of the music.
It was best to let the music
unravel and focus the truth of the night. (3)

Which world is more true -- the world of music, or the world of the moon? He writes, speaking of the totality of truth (which has chemicals to add to music and the moon): "war the constant, we the variant" (15)...

I really loved these darkly Emersonian (nature always wears the colors of the spirit) lines from "Good to Ghost":

The world is a veil.
Its effects total
the imagination. (4)

What does it mean to find beauty (the result of fierceness following its heart) in a broken world? "is there more / sadness in beauty / than beauty / in sadness" (28)? And is the same mind responsible for the world's brokenness as is the mind capable of seeing beauty "nevertheless" (4)?

[Dominic Transilvanicus · Rating 5 out of 5]

the elegy becomes the quintessential mode of communication, a collective doxology to the tragedy of existence. Gizzi's latest and very well-received poetry collection it's all about loss and the way we cope with it. It's not a personal, autobiographical collection, but one that includes each and everyone's pain as the "I" of the poems, with which the author assumes a playful stance, throwing it around like a ball, leaving the reader to mentally mask himself with it wherever, whenever it flashes.

[Caleb Russell · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved the gravity of these poems, some of his lines despite common words and being incredibly short carry so much emotion, demureness, it’s like it’s all covered in velvet.

“like an echo

outlasting me

as if nothing

could polish

the sky”

Favorite poems were Findspot Unknown, Dissociadelic, Notre Musique, The Posthumous Life of Childhood, and Nimbus

[Muhammad Rajab Al-mukarrom · Rating 4 out of 5]

“The old language reminds us of tradition; of nights, of tapers billowing by the window; of balmy and aromatic breezes; recalls historically, our girl asks for a poem; each week or so says, where is my poem, you don’t write no more, sluggard; I say, I don’t care, when I see you and we buckle and your shirt is on the chair and the room is blowsy, poetry don’t matter; after, when I saw you in the mirror, I wrote: poetry died today.”

— Roxy Music, Peter Gizzi

[Oliver Shrouder · Rating 2 out of 5]

Hugely disappointing - follows a poetic style I've never really enjoyed, which is to use a high register with no anchor-point to create a dreamlike atmosphere with nothing to string the words together - disparate and floaty, and doesn't do anything for me as poetry

[Jack Malik · Rating 3 out of 5]

I would love to give this a five star. Alas, I can’t because there were no bangers or any poems that I liked in this collection—even though there were many great lines: one even inspired me to write my own poem!

Finished this in one sitting. Flows like water. Would recommend.

[Cooch · Rating 4 out of 5]

Some good poetry here

Some of these poems worked for me and some didn't. Some of the more 'prosey' pieces in particular seemed weaker. The best of the poems were strong.

[Andy Oram · Rating 5 out of 5]

Gizzi's word choices are simple and elemental; they spurt out in short phrases as if he can't muster a complete thought. But he builds effective poems from them, "To be unleashed as a verb."

[anon · Rating 5 out of 5]

perfect amazing stunning

[Ross · Rating 4 out of 5]

terrific

[Miles Hadfield · Rating 2 out of 5]

More a tame abstraction than a fierce elegy.

[Chris Wilson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Poems of grief and beauty.

[Robert Reinhard · Rating 5 out of 5]

In a great tradition of American poets like Stevens, Williams, Creeley, and Emily Dickinson, each beat a force

[eva · Rating 2 out of 5]

is there more sadness in beauty than beauty in sadness