Fierce elegy

In Peter Gizzi’s powerful new collection, we find, in the poet’s words, 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. One of our foremost practitioners of the lyric, Gizzi here extends his mastery of the form. In their quest for a lyric reality, these poems remind us that elegy is lament but also – as it has been for centuries – a mode of love poetry as well.