Elegy by Mary Jo Bang

Graywolf Press, 2007
Review by G.A. Banks-Martin

How To Mourn A Son

On March 6, 2008, Elegy, Mary Jo Bang’s fifth book of poetry, won The National Book Critics Circle award for 2007. The book, an extended lament for the poet’s deceased son, reminds us that death, while final for the dead, must be contended with by the living daily; nightly. For after the lost is announced, and the body reduced to ash, the narrator states my mothering lips are stitched/ Shut by sorrow.

The early poems, pages 3- 36, are concerned with beginning the mourning process. Here three critical points arise: mourning goes on night and day, no one really understands, and there is no relief. These stanzas from The Cruel Wheel Turns Twice best illustrate the first idea:
A bus slithers by
A din. The aluminum morning takes on more tension
And becomes a metal rod
Straight from a tunnel, dropped in a gate groove.

Disappointment. And again. The End gate
Opens and it’s, Please
Come back. Please Be. Then nothing. Only end-

Less night taking off from the smooth tarmac slate.
The potpie clock, its stock of twelve numbers,
A stew for the weak and the weary.

The poem ends And daylight a gift tied with some tinsel, however, the gift, is simply a break from night. Likewise, Landscape With The Fall of Icarus is a description of the guilt that consumes the day. The poem explores the last moment mother and son spends together. The mother struggles to remember which train she watched her son ride away on and declares:
That car should be forever sealed in amber.
That dolorous day should be forever

Embedded in amber.
In garnet. In amber. In opal. In order

To keep going on. And how can it be
That this means nothing to anyone but me now.
This poem’s last line is one of the many lessons offered; mourning is personal and worked out in isolation. In addition, we begin to hear whispered, if you do not understand; if you think I can just get over it, you are either very young, or inexperienced. We will hear this whisper throughout the rest of the collection. We will hear it even, after we reach the final turning point, the last line of Now, The body as ash/ is inadequate. We will hear it whispered in every line including the very last Goodnight. The ordeal comes/ To its periodic end/ Which simply means/The ahead is again. Many will say that it is a cliqued message but it is a necessary message because we cannot speak of such lost with the level of purity, honesty, and simplicity, as Mary Jo Bang does in Elegy without experience.