Peter Gizzi

A breathtaking book-length sequence in which each line or sentence, often paratactic, non-hierarchical, could be a poem in its own right. As if wordings had been gifted to him out of the ether, one-liners, two-liners coalesce into love lyrics, or a thought enters his head which, step by step, he unravels until a nucleus is reached and pierced

Hannah Sullivan, T. S. Eliot Prize judging panel

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

This is the poetry of mastery and maturity... How often do we hear people say “There are no words” in the face of intolerable grief? Here Gizzi gives us the words. Words which work towards their own truth, fierce, intense, immediate... I would defy all but the hardest of hearts not to experience the moistening of an eye, and moments of joy along the way. Gizzi’s Fierce Elegy, in its ferocity, is for the Ages

Gizzi writes very beautiful poems... He is a real poet: his poems always strive to achieve things only possible in poetry, even when they’re prose. Listen, only, to the staccato gasps of “Of the Air”; a piercing prose sequence with shades of Beckett, it’s the book’s highlight: hard, spare, real. A song of lost love.

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

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

Peter Gizzi

Praise for Fierce Elegy

A breathtaking book-length sequence in which each line or sentence, often paratactic, non-hierarchical, could be a poem in its own right. As if wordings had been gifted to him out of the ether, one-liners, two-liner ...

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 beautif ...

This is the poetry of mastery and maturity... How often do we hear people say “There are no words” in the face of intolerable grief? Here Gizzi gives us the words. Words which work towards their own truth, fierce, i ...

A breathtaking book-length sequence in which each line or sentence, often paratactic, non-hierarchical, could be a poem in its own right. As if wordings had been gifted to him out of the ether, one-liners, two-liner ...

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 beautif ...

This is the poetry of mastery and maturity... How often do we hear people say “There are no words” in the face of intolerable grief? Here Gizzi gives us the words. Words which work towards their own truth, fierce, i ...

A breathtaking book-length sequence in which each line or sentence, often paratactic, non-hierarchical, could be a poem in its own right. As if wordings had been gifted to him out of the ether, one-liners, two-liner ...

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 beautif ...

This is the poetry of mastery and maturity... How often do we hear people say “There are no words” in the face of intolerable grief? Here Gizzi gives us the words. Words which work towards their own truth, fierce, i ...

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