Fierce Elegy

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<>

Product details

• Authors: Peter Gizzi, Gizzi Peter
• Publisher: Penguin Books Uk
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback
• Released: 04.07.2024
• EAN: 9781802065244
• ISBN: 978-1-80206-524-4
• No. of pages: 80
• Dimensions: 130 mm x 200 mm x 5 mm
• Subjects: Fiction > Poetry, drama; Guides > Self-help, everyday life > Lifestyle, personal development; Coping with death & bereavement, Narrative theme: Death, grief, loss, Sociology: death and dying, Coping with / advice about death and bereavement, Elegy / Elegiac styles, health; fitness; self help; dogs; animals