Peter Gizzi

fierce-elegy

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Fierce Elegy

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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

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

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

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

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

SHORTLISTED FOR THE T. S. ELIOT PRIZE 2024 
 
The powerful new collection from legendary American poet Peter Gizzi, reckoning with the transformative power of elegy through poems of lament and love 
 
‘I am awestruck, dumbfounded … a masterwork’ Ocean Vuong 
'Transcendent ... He identifies the thing we're all searching for' The New Yorker 
 
In Fierce Elegy, Peter Gizzi contends with a decade of grief, and learns to transform a broken heart into new strength. These are poems of loss; of love; of the strangeness of being a self amid the fury of the world; and of our ongoing closeness with the dead. They are soaring yet grounded, vulnerable and brave. Ears attuned, grip assured. Mind free.

Peter 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.

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

Fierce Elegy

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