Although Ms Bang is clearly a major poet, for this reviewer, Elegy was a disappointment as a coherent whole. Ms Bang clearly felt a compelling need to try to capture her grief in any and every way possible. The result is a  frustrating - for the poet, but equally exasperating for the reader - circumnavigation about her grief from every angle trying to pin it down and elucidate it with metaphors and similes galore, often in the same poem. This effort and consequent style remind me of my experience of reading dozens of book reviews by John Leonard, whose prose was characterized by occasionally brilliant aphoristic successes, surrounded by many more mundane and sometimes only marginally associated analyses. In this regard I always considered him analogous to a home run slugger, whose home runs out of the park were sandwiched on either side by the proverbially high number of strike outs that home run hitters enjoy when they are not connecting squarely with the ball. Just so Ms Bang.

I found the often jarring conglomeration of mixed metaphors distracting, constantly reminding me, as in "A Place" (in which we start out with a seabed, progress to clouds, to "rounds in the ring" to a castle and "riverward rat" to fire, air, tin and ending with "Lethe water") of the lack of a smooth and organic inter- and intra-textual consistency one has come to expect of poets of Mary Jo Bang's talent in a thematically united collection of poems. Although these were individually written over a year, even as stand-alone poems many of them fail to cohere.