The Great Inevitable

Peter Gizzi’s Fierce Elegy, which this week won the T. S. Eliot prize, is prefaced with nearly two full pages of unbridled encomia from the likes of Ocean Vuong, Rae Armantrout and Alice Notley. Unbridled is no exaggeration: Vuong is “awestruck and dumbfounded”; Armantrout commands, “If anyone tells you the lyric is dead, give them Peter Gizzi”; according to Notley, these poems constitute the “virtuoso singing”. Consider me, then, a foolish heretic.

The elegiac brings with it a problem, perhaps not altogether inconvenient for the poet: all that cumbersome baggage for the reader to contend with at the prospect. The natural care that attends one’s attention to anyone’s grief can present a challenge to critical thinking. As the beloveds of my life depart with increased frequency, I am arguably more liable than a younger reader to the temptation of positive bias. But the disappearing act of the object of love requires not merely an emotional but also a psychological resettlement, as the ego, abandoned, seeks to navigate life’s ultimate ghosting, that fatal return-to-sender. The means to express this satisfactorily for a reader is dependent on a vital primary element: the conjuring – and its sympathetic failure.

Gizzi’s poems here are centred on the lyric “I”; any sense of the love objects is occulted by ego. This creates significant barriers to connection. If the reader has no sense of who and what has been lost, then what is there to the cost? In love objects’ place, Gizzi reaches for the phrase-making of absence. His tonal strength, his predilection for the portentous and chiastic, can distract from the fact that there is far less going on than meets the eye (or ear): “It was best to let the moon unravel / and focus the truth of the music. / It was best to let the music / unravel and focus the truth of the night”; “Hold on to whatever magic in the backyard where / we bury our thoughts, things of the world / Things of the world like an afterlife of the world / to bury our setting outness”; “is there more / sadness in beauty / than beauty / in sadness”. To the last of these queries, the answer is that, in all brutal probability, they are coequal; but the philosophy of these competing yet complementary notions should surely mark the starting point for a poem rather than, effectively, its conclusion.

Elsewhere, abstraction and obfuscation belie Vuong’s other assertion, that this collection “believes in language”. This is a rather odd claim to begin with (that a poet “believes in language” – one would hope so); and, in view of lines such as “the psyche’s / paper-blue / hieratic light”, “a cellular memory of torn events”, “the mystery / of the ordinary / becoming / the me in I”, and “an everyday annunciation the wound lifts from sorrow”, it is itself hard to believe in.

Instead, Gizzi is at his best when he trusts in the power of simplicity to prompt a complex response and purchase on the part of the reader. “To see that far into oneself / with only a tear for a mirror” are two such memorable lines.

Deborah Landau’s Skeletons also grapples with that Big Theme, “death, incessant klepto”, but from the first poem in this series of titular acrostics, begun during lockdown and punctuated by non-acrostic poems of the “flesh”, she won me over. It’s hard not to be charmed by a poet whose opening gambit opts for frank, serious, darkling levity: “So whatever’s the opposite of a Buddhist that’s what I am. / Kindhearted, yes, but knee-deep in existential gloom”.

Across seventy pages of the meat and bone – both poems and emphatic blank space – Landau demonstrates a refreshing awareness of the inherent absurdity of the writing of poems, set as this is in the context of the Great Inevitable. There is an intentionality to her leaps. The shifts in register are nimble and witty, demotic and grand: “Spooky, everyone under their face seems to be / kaput know what I mean? / Excessive sprawl of generations emptying onward / labile, fleeting then that’s it forever, bang”.

It helps that the pandemic as collective existential moment invites recognition: whether Landau is pondering the purchase of a dog (“Klutzes, what wouldwedo with a puppy?”) or coming to the end of her rope of diversion (“The long and the short of it is a podcast can only take you so far. / There goes our summer neighbor / Wife-of-Bath’ing it at the barbecue again / her toned shoulders, her backtalk and small army of dogs”), the reader nods with total recall.

Deborah Landau’s real and impressive accomplishment in Skeletons is her fashioning of a cleverly structured cumulative experience. As the reader progresses the book starts to feel like a convincing expression of the knotty, touching truth of our humanness and its beautiful, short span: the “precarious yes exquisite alive”.

Kathryn Gray’s second collection of poems, Hollywood or Home, was among the Sunday Times Best Poetry Books of 2023

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