Fierce Elegy
A poetry collection that crystallizes the emotions of loss and bereavement into short pieces charged with light and music. Even as it faces severe themes, it avoids heaviness alone and keeps hold of humor and intimacy.
Work Information
It turns grief into a form of strength that keeps a person moving forward.
Peter Gizzi's Fierce Elegy reworks the elegy as a living form of language, drawing on experience shaped by friends, family, and his own illness. Between its spare lines, pain and brightness, solitude and solidarity coexist, leaving a deep aftertaste after reading.
Review Summaries
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It is valued for its concision and resonance, and for leaving behind a strong sense of lived presence rather than simply dwelling on sorrow. Although it takes up heavy subject matter, it lingers as a warm rather than cold reading experience.
Book Information
- Publisher
- Penguin
- Published
- 2024-07-04
- Pages
- 80 pages
- Language
- 英語
- Size
- 12.9 x 0.6 x 19.8 cm
- ISBN-13
- 9781802065244
- ISBN-10
- 1802065245
- Price
- 2621 JPY
- Category
- 洋書/Self-Help/Death & Grief
WINNER OF THE T. S. ELIOT PRIZE 2024 The powerful new collection from legendary American poet Peter Gizzi, reckoning with the transformative power of elegy through poems of lament and love ‘I am awestruck, dumbfounded … a masterwork’ Ocean Vuong 'Transcendent ... He identifies the thing we're all searching for' The New Yorker In Fierce Elegy , Peter Gizzi contends with a decade of grief, and learns to transform a broken heart into new strength. These are poems of loss; of love; of the strangeness of being a self amid the fury of the world; and of our ongoing closeness with the dead. They are soaring yet grounded, vulnerable and brave. Ears attuned, grip assured. Mind free.
Peter Gizzi is the author of many collections of poetry including Now It’s Dark (2020), Archeophonics, a finalist for the National Book Award (2016), Threshold Songs (2011), and In Defense of Nothing: Selected Poems, 1987–2011 (2014). He has also published several limited-edition chapbooks, folios, and artist books. Marjorie Perloff has called him ‘a master of the mot juste ’; Robert Creeley, ‘one of the most exceptional poets of his generation’. Adrienne Rich has said ‘his disturbing lyricism is like no other’; and John Ashbery thought him ‘the most exciting new poet to come along in quite a while’. He lives in Holyoke, MA.
Reviews
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Heavy as lead on sparse imagery, fragmented syntax.
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Gizzi’s poems are deceptively simple. His focus on the past, on loss, is nevertheless a life-affirming exercise. In “But the Heart in a Sense Is Far from Me Floating Out There” he assures us that holding on to both abstract memories and the details of the past are what makes us human… “Hold onto whatever magic in the backyard where we bury our thoughts, things of the world/ Things of the world like an afterlife of the world to bury our setting outness”
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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.
Related Literary Awards
- T. S. Eliot Prize Edition 32 (2024) ・Winner