Elegy: Poems

Mary Jo Bang's fifth collection, Elegy, chronicles the year following the death of her son. By weaving the particulars of her own loss into a tapestry that also contains the elements common to all losses, Bang creates something far larger than a mere lament. Continually in search of an adequate metaphor for the most profound and private grief, the poems in Elegy confront, in stark terms and with a resilient voice, how memory haunts the living and brings the dead back to life. Within these intimate and personal poems is a persistently urgent, and deeply touching, examination of grief itself.

These poems are short, simply written and very powerful. They center on the poet's loss of a son and chronicle the emotional aftermath of a year of grief. One contemplates the astonishing reality that a child has become a heap of ash stored in an urn. These are not poems of a hopeful moving on, but a solemn representation of a time of memory and shock.