Fierce Elegy

Peter Gizzi’s Fierce Elegy is ‘worldly-wise, generous, warm and human’, writes John Field

When we think of something ‘fierce’ we’re probably thinking of something formidably violent – a wild beast – and, if we combine this with ‘elegy’, perhaps we’re raging against the dying of the light à la Dylan Thomas. However, ‘fierce’ is a slippery term to define – not only are we raging against the night, we’re ardent and eager, we’re high-spirited, brave and valiant. Although it’s spare and elliptical, Peter Gizzi’s Fierce Elegy, his tenth collection, is also worldly-wise, generous, warm and human. To read it is to spend time with a mind skipping from thought to thought, full of laughter and pain. It’s breathtaking.

Gizzi’s epigraph, ‘Only in connection with a body / does a shadow make sense’, is taken from Rosmarie Waldrop, a long-standing friend at Wesleyan University Press. It’s a yin and yang sort of statement, reminding us that to think of life without death is impossible, but also (and reassuringly) that we cannot think of death without remembering life.

The collection is set in a world of arresting visual beauty. In the opening poem, ‘Findspot Unknown’, the speaker is ‘watching one single birch / become lightning stunning the sky’. Perhaps we catch an echo of Dylan Thomas’s forked lightning in ‘Do Not Go Gentle into that Good Night’, but here even the smallest things (‘one single birch’) have the power to stun. Despite this beauty, despite this power, Gizzi is clear that the self and the universe are separate: ‘Landscape is a made thing, / to see the mind seeing itself.’ Fierce Elegy resists the Romantic urge to read the self through the landscape. Gizzi picks this up again later in the collection in ‘Romanticism’:

Why not consider the squirrel
in its leafy surround?
It may be in a state
of impersonal grief
for all I know.
Nature morphing
and dying and
looping all around it.

It’s a complex vision, but it is not without warmth, without a thought for the world beyond the self. Yet Gizzi acknowledges the difficulty of crossing the divide between the self and the world: ‘What is the real / but a reflecting pool’. Like it or not, humanity is narcissistic. No matter how hard we look, we tend to see ourselves staring back.

Death is another division. In the playfully titled ‘I’m Good to Ghost’ the speaker opens with ‘It was all so Orfeo / the other night’, referencing the Middle English narrative lay ‘Sir Orfeo’. A chivalric reimagining of the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, ‘Sir Orfeo’ is a powerful rendition of grief. For Gizzi, it’s a less frantic trip to wrestle Eurydice from the jaws of Hades, to try and snatch her from the shadow in order to live a life wholly in the light. Gizzi’s speaker’s loss is smaller, more prosaic: she’s disappeared ‘between the rug / on my floor and / the sun setting / out the window, / between the radiator / and a dusky / kaleidoscopic light’. The boundaries between life and death are blurred as the speaker wonders ‘Where do you go / when I don’t see you? / Or who am I when / you’re not around?’ We’re taken back to the epigraph and are reminded of the Gordian knot tying death to life, and life to death.

There’s a palpable sense of consolation to the collection. The final poem, ‘Consider the Wound’, works with the language of Matthew 6:28–29: ‘Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they neither toil nor spin; yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these.’ Gizzi’s speaker has sorrow on his mind: ‘consider its eerie call and every shape of pain // wounds of the field, how they grow, they toil not, / neither do they spin’. Yet, as the collection reaches its finale, the natural world quickens the pulse and the self hungers for fresh experience. Yes, ‘death is happening’ but, in a brilliant moment of standing up and carrying on, ‘all that was left is where I am now’. Fierce Elegy is somehow elemental and existential.

Peter Gizzi’s Fierce Elegy (Penguin Poetry) is shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize 2024. John Field blogs at Poor Rude Lines.