Fierce Elegy

Peter Gizzi
(Penguin Books, 2024); pbk, £9.99

In his collection, Fierce Elegy, Peter Gizzi offers us words which recognise all the contradictions in loss and grieving. He gives us ‘elegy’, from Greek elegeia, from elegos, a mourning song. Add ‘fierce’ to that, and we have a flavour of the intensity of the offering.

An American poet, a professor at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, Gizzi is the author of eight collections of poetry, including Archeophonics, a finalist in the American National Book Awards in 2016.  In 2024 Gizzi won the National Book Award for Poetry for Fierce Elegy.

This is the poetry of mastery and maturity, thematically linked by human experience of the inevitable pains of life. How often do we hear people say “There are no words” in the face of intolerable grief? Here Gizzi gives us the words. Words which work towards their own truth, fierce, intense, immediate. Hard emotional work for the reader perhaps but, counterintuitively, the less ‘trying to understand’ on their part, the more the lines release meaning.

I am reminded of a man crossing a lake in the French Alps walking a highwire. As I stood on the shore shielding my eyes from the sun the man appeared casual, moving effortlessly as he took step after step. He paused as a gust of wind caught him and shook the wire. Unconcerned he continued his walk.

Let’s not pretend that a man can master the highwire without dedication and practice. Gizzi’s writing is skilfully accessible as he draws the reader in using short lines and enjambment, giving the piece pace and energy, but meaning comes along later, in the pauses, and the use of white space in some of the shorter pieces.

We are taken from the opening of Findspot Unknown with its references to the afterlife,

Thus spoke the silvered asphodel
Next to the factory ruin

to an immediate juxtaposition of what we might imagine, and what is,

I saw a better life, it was far off
sun on moss next to a friend,
the softening air, the dandelion fluff.

But don’t believe in this as a few lines later,

And out of nothing, breath.
A beast like shadow in the glass.
To see a thought, a wing
In night, the long brooding.
Take it, listen, the night is orchestral
When the power’s on.

Words as music, lyrical lines which elevate the contradictory words to sing their laments, their mourning song. To isolate lines in this way to shore up meaning seems irreverent to the rhythm of the piece, disturbing the tension between having, not having, the anxious wait for creative thought, as in the section, ‘Revisionary’,

I’m hanging on. A whisper
Certain prayers are tied to this ribbon
How in hell can nature throw clay into art
Into a speaking being into air[.]

In the following intensely beautiful lyrical lines, Gizzi creates images of the natural world, and releases an energy which says, ‘come with me right through to the end’.

The music is there in ‘Creeley Song’, in its simple homage to the poet Robert Creeley, whose words are threaded through it. The poems, the songs, the love are not lost. Gizzi has taken the parts ‘now in pieces’ and in the way of the Japanese practice of Kintsugi transformed them with lines of gold, and a nod to refrain.

The meditative quality of Gizzi’s work evokes empathy so his use of ‘I’ becomes universal in ‘The Posthumous Life of Childhood’, and again in ‘Consider the Wound’. The collection reaches a crescendo in this final section, an agonising examination of pain and its reconciliation,

Wund, wuntho, wunda, und
The mother opens every wound, the wound opens every word
The asymmetries of a body in the act of elegy, ungainly
in its pilgrimage[.]

Gizzi makes it clear that this is not about individual suffering. We are invited in, to recognise, ‘for every wound belonging to me as good belongs to you.’

Pilgrimage is the journey Gizzi offers through his Fierce Elegy, travelling through not only pain, but deep existential change from carnal origins to finding at journey’s end that ‘all that is left is where I am now’. Pilgrimage strengthens faith that the words will reach us and the echo of their music remain. I would defy all but the hardest of hearts not to experience the moistening of an eye, and moments of joy along the way. Gizzi’s Fierce Elegy, in its ferocity, is for the Ages.

Jeannie MacLean