Scan barcode
A review by ausma23
Elegy by Mary Jo Bang
5.0
In Elegy, Mary Jo Bang paces around that gaping, cavernous hole left by grief that Edna St. Vincent Millay wrote about: “Where you used to be, there is a hole in the world, which I find myself constantly walking around in the daytime, and falling in at night.” Bang describes the changed structure of even the most mundane aspects of life in the aftermath of her son’s death, the five stages in rhythmic alliteration, ruing, regretting, trapped in the endless eddies of her grief-induced guilt: “I see you as a grief heat hallucination telling me I could have saved you if I’d been better.” When she exits that cloud of torment and seems to reach acceptance, her words burst forth in a crescendo of love, like the explosion from a dying star, as she describes it in "She Said": "It was as if life were being lived / In the afterglow of a starburst." But this emotional outpouring is no better illustrated than in her magnum opus, “You Were You Are Elegy”:
“This is how I measure
The year. Everything Was My Fault
Has been the theme of the song
I've been singing,
Even when you've told me to quiet.
I haven't been quiet.
I've been crying. I think you
Have forgiven me. You keep
Putting your hand on my shoulder
When I'm crying.
Thank you for that. And
For the ineffable sense
Of continuance. You were. You are
The brightest thing in the shop window
And the most beautiful seldom I ever saw.”
Bang captures the shell shock of finding oneself in an entirely new and foreign world where simultaneously everything, everything, still reminds you of the dearly departed. There is that wandering sense that they are not truly gone from this place, just misplaced, hidden, somewhere behind a veil you can’t penetrate. Her words bargain with themselves as she tries to reconcile this ultimately irreconcilable absence: "It begins to sink in. Dead / Is dead, not just not / Here."
This collection summoned the devastation I felt in the days and weeks and months after my mother's death to the point where I could feel the physical sensation of that same dread — the heavy heart, like an anvil on or inside my chest — in Bang's vivid words like muscle memory. Yet I also took so much comfort in being able to relate to her pain and her attempts at reconciliation and self-forgiveness. Most of all, though, I was comforted by her acknowledgement that this wound can never be healed, only accepted: "You are reduced / To the after-sorrow / That will last my lifetime." Memory alone will have to sustain us.
“This is how I measure
The year. Everything Was My Fault
Has been the theme of the song
I've been singing,
Even when you've told me to quiet.
I haven't been quiet.
I've been crying. I think you
Have forgiven me. You keep
Putting your hand on my shoulder
When I'm crying.
Thank you for that. And
For the ineffable sense
Of continuance. You were. You are
The brightest thing in the shop window
And the most beautiful seldom I ever saw.”
Bang captures the shell shock of finding oneself in an entirely new and foreign world where simultaneously everything, everything, still reminds you of the dearly departed. There is that wandering sense that they are not truly gone from this place, just misplaced, hidden, somewhere behind a veil you can’t penetrate. Her words bargain with themselves as she tries to reconcile this ultimately irreconcilable absence: "It begins to sink in. Dead / Is dead, not just not / Here."
This collection summoned the devastation I felt in the days and weeks and months after my mother's death to the point where I could feel the physical sensation of that same dread — the heavy heart, like an anvil on or inside my chest — in Bang's vivid words like muscle memory. Yet I also took so much comfort in being able to relate to her pain and her attempts at reconciliation and self-forgiveness. Most of all, though, I was comforted by her acknowledgement that this wound can never be healed, only accepted: "You are reduced / To the after-sorrow / That will last my lifetime." Memory alone will have to sustain us.