Several of my impressions of Elegy have blurred in the meantime, unfortunately, though not the main one, which is that the book is not quite what its blurbs would lead one to expect. The front inner flap of the dust jacket tells us that the book "chronicles the year following the death of her son" and embodies "the most profound and private grief," and variations on this theme recur in the blurbs from Marjorie Perloff, C. D. Wright, Nick Flynn, and Fanny Howe. All of which sets you up for a sort of contemporary In Memoriam...which is not exactly what we get.
Bang's poetry is weird, witty, oblique, skittery, playful... and, though relatively subdued and often streaked with pain, Elegy is still Mary Jo Bang. A poem from her previous book, The Eye Like a Strange Balloon, pops in at one point (explicably enough -- Strange Balloon is a book of ekphrastic poems, and the poem in question, "Three Trees," was inspired by one of her son's paintings), and utterly different though the premises of the two books are, the tonality of the poem blends easily into both. Elegy is unlike her other books, but hardly utterly unlike -- it shares their Bang-ness.
Anyone picking this up expecting the transparently confessional -- as I did, and I should have known better -- will be...disappointed? I hope not. Thwarted, perhaps, initially, very likely confused for a bit, but perhaps also relieved that the book is not so frankly exploitative as it might have been, perhaps moved to see that emotional honesty can mean not the relinquishment of art but its closer embrace.
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