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OverviewPeter Gizzi's powerful new collection reckons with the transformative power of elegy, through poems of lament and love In March 2021, Peter Gizzi was diagnosed with a very rare blood disease. This book is what followed- composed slowly and painstakingly, though for Gizzi with unprecedented speed; written with an eye as much to his own impending mortality as to a decade of losses of friends and family, yet suffused, beautifully, with music and light. The book's broad subject is elegy, which Gizzi calls 'a mode that can transform a broken heart in a fierce world into a fierce heart in a broken world.' Here, ferocity is reimagined as vulnerability, bravery and discovery, a braiding of emotional and otherworldly depth. Joy and sorrow make a complex ecosystem. And then, as we read, it is as if we have left our bodies, are looking down on them from above, and find - as Rae Armantrout has put it in an appreciation of this book - that 'everything is fine, better than fine.' 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 openness, and a work of love. 'Gizzi's best poems exist on a different plane, as if he has achieved and is writing from a transcendent vantage most of us only strive for... He identifies the thing we're all searching for in voices, in poems, in language, in songs; why we read and why we listen' The New Yorker Full Product DetailsAuthor: Peter GizziPublisher: Penguin Books Ltd Imprint: Penguin Dimensions: Width: 12.90cm , Height: 0.70cm , Length: 19.80cm Weight: 0.079kg ISBN: 9781802065244ISBN 10: 1802065245 Pages: 80 Publication Date: 04 July 2024 Audience: General/trade , College/higher education , Professional and scholarly , General , Tertiary & Higher Education Format: Paperback Publisher's Status: Active Availability: To order  Stock availability from the supplier is unknown. We will order it for you and ship this item to you once it is received by us. Table of ContentsReviews"""In Peter Gizzi's Fierce Elegy (Wesleyan Univ., Aug.), poems on ferocious heartbrokenness also attest to joy.""--Library Journal ""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" 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 * Guardian * 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'Conner * Harvard Review * 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 * 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 * Author InformationPeter 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. Tab Content 6Author Website:Countries AvailableAll regions |
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