Fierce Elegy

by Peter Gizzi

Overview

Peter Gizzi's powerful new collection reminds us that the elegy is lament but also—as it has been for centuries—a work of love

Winner of the T.S. Eliot Prize

Winner of the Massachusetts Book Award

Peter Gizzi has said 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. In their quest for a lyric reality, these poems remind us that elegy is lament but also—as it has been for centuries—a work of love. "This new poetry," Kamau Brathwaite has written about Gizzi, "taking such care of temperature—the time & details of the world—meaning the space(s) in which we live—defining love in this way. Writing along the edge. A way of writing about hope."

[sample poem]

Creely Song
all that is lovely
in words, even
if gone to pieces
all that is lovely
gone, all of it
for love and
autobiography
as if I were
writing this
hello, listen
the plan is
the body and
all of it for love
now in pieces
all that is lovely
echoes still
in life & death
still memory
gardens open
onto windows
lovely, the charm
that mirrors
all that was, all
that is, lovely
in a song

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780819500694
Publisher:	Wesleyan University Press
Publication date:	02/20/2025
Series:	Wesleyan Poetry Series
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	72
File size:	453 KB
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Peter Gizzi is the author of many collections of poetry, including Now It's Dark (2020), Archeophonics (2016), a finalist for the National Book Award, Threshold Songs (2011), and In Defense of Nothing: Selected Poems, 1987–2011 (2014), a finalist for the LA Times Book Award. He has also published several limited-edition chapbooks, folios, and artist books. Marjorie Perloff has called him "a master of the mot juste and of sound structure;" 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.

Table of Contents

Findspot Unknown Revisonary • Creeley Song • Notes on Sound And Vision Notre Musique • The Posthumous Life of Childhood • I Am Who Sent Me • Nimbus • Romanticism • Roxy Music • Of the Air • Ecstatic Joy and Its Variants • Spooky Action • Dissociadelic • But The Heart in a Sense Is Far From Me Floating Out There • Consider the Wound • Acknowledgments

Editorial Reviews

"In Peter Gizzi's Fierce Elegy, poems on ferocious heartbrokenness also attest to joy."—Library Journal

"I know of no better companion to word our common lament for us, with us, than Gizzi's new Fierce Elegy. For those of us devoted already to his work, we'll find here the fullest condensation of his powers I know — poems of fearless questioning, muse-bruised, words with "a hunger / for real things," and the real things that hunger right back. For those who don't know his work, you'll discover one of this nation's foremost practitioners of lyric art, refusing that the poem should do anything less than posit one human life in actual relation with the world entire. His life, your life, mine — such are the fierce demands of love in a world where all one loves also leaves."—Dan Beachy-Quick, Westword

"Gizzi is a master of the elegiac mode His subject isn't loss alone, but loss interwoven with afterlife. Shadows, reflections, mirrors, and migrating birds populate his poems, and he weaves one state of consciousness into another, like gossamer Fierce Elegy is lyrical and transcendent. It is also fierce in the sense that overcoming the broken world is the ultimate act of defiance."—Amanda Holmes Duffy, Washington Independent Review

"With his last several collections, Peter Gizzi has distinguished himself as one of America's finest living poets. In his latest book, Fierce Elegy, we find the poet writing at the height of his powers."—James O'Connor, Harvard Review

"Lyrics of resignation are juxtaposed with ecstatic lines that reimagine silence as 'conversations with the dead.' Spare and raked of impurities, these poems reside in an airy purgatory of the soul... In its beautiful, fiery insistence this collection redeclares the elegy as the undying practice of the living."—Oluwaseun Olayiwola, The Guardian

"In his latest book, we recognize Gizzi's distinctive voice, but its melancholy is even more intensified, now almost black as ink. We might call it lyric after catastrophe: the world has suffered blows, shocks, accidents, and destructions and things are no better for things, which are often as not broken, undone, burned, or ruined, 'language marching into empire / starving the words.' What remains now are no more than 'the ruins of anything.' And yet the book is a necessary reminder to continue to live, perhaps to love, and certainly to die."—Stéphane Bouquet, Chicago Review

"For Gizzi, silence lives inside the poems, its words charged by it just as, for Gerard Manley Hopkins, 'the world is charged with the grandeur of God.' Fierce Elegy anneals its phrases to the clotted silences that surround them, so that rather than a continuous utterance, Gizzi's rhythms are those of words teased, wrested, chiseled, and siphoned out of the darkness, with all of the nuances of sound those operations imply. Fierce Elegy differs equally from elegies that establish strong ties to a tradition (e.g., Milton) and from those that imagine themselves as wholly anti-elegy (e.g., Plath and Ginsberg). It omits not only proper names but dead addressees altogether, and the affect set in most salient contrast to sadness is actually ecstasy."—John Steen, The Poetry Project Newsletter

"These poems are assertions of a spiritual excess that won't die."—Fanny Howe, author of Love and I

"Having read Peter Gizzi's work through the immense and singular wingspan his books make, I am still awestruck and dumbfounded as to how these poems are made. This book believes in language. It also offers it the utmost reverence: by lowering it to human height, where the living are. What a masterwork of deft maneuvering within the dynamo Gizzi has made of the lyric."—Ocean Vuong, author of Time is a Mother

"The title says this collection is one poem, and it is, with its repeated vocabulary, shades-of-winter mood, and virtuoso singing. Amazing single poems. The elegy keeps naming itself, enjoying its form. So you can love it."—Alice Notley, author of The Descent of Alette

"These poems are elegies. Or these poems are about being torn apart and floating free. They come from an old place where grief overlaps with beauty. Gizzi is a poet of disembodied brightness. Reading Gizzi is almost like having a near death experience, you know those accounts from people who have nearly died and who say they left their bodies, looked down on them from above, and everything was fine, better than fine. Gizzi's writing invokes and produces something like that, a near religious ecstasy, but one with no God in sight. It's as if he has learned to give up control and still find perfect balance riding whatever carries his voice. If anyone tells you the lyric is dead, give them Peter Gizzi."—Rae Armantrout, author of Finalists

From the Publisher