To describe what is absent and to make present what is not there is the work of the English elegy, a form that traces its history back to the Pearl poem, to Milton’s Lycidas, John Donne, and relatively more recently to Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s In Memoriam, and more recent still to the poetry of Dylan Thomas and Elizabeth Bishop. So, when the back sleeve of Victoria Chang’s new poetry book claims that her “one long, skinny rectangle… became a new form with which to study sorrow,” I become immediately interested, then quite skeptical, and finally, disappointed. I’d hardly call poems written in the form of an obituary a new form, but Chang’s Obit delivers in other, more interesting ways. There are diverse ways to grieve. Victoria Chang offers readers a more intellectual grief, a chillier one, but one no less true for the telling.
In Obit the deceased are notably absent. The poet admits defeat and chooses to focus on recapturing the fragments. I am reminded more of Elizabeth Bishop’s “One Art,” where the losses accumulate, but nevertheless remain fragmentary and fragmented.
In Obit, sometimes the fragments are things, sometimes people, sometimes situations. Chang’s Obituaries are dedicated to the fragments: “My Father’s Frontal Lobe—died,” “Language—died,” “The Future—died,” “Civility—died,” “My Mother’s Teeth,” “Appetite—died,” “Oxygen—died,” “Home—died,” “Time—died,” “Control—died,” “Memory—died.” The small elegies that form the totality of the loss each become artifacts, the ephemeral become tangible.
Chang’s losses are substantial. Her father lost the ability to speak after suffering a stroke and her mother died from pulmonary fibrosis. Of all the types of brain damage a person can suffer, brain damage that results in the loss of language is the most heartbreaking. In fact, the late neurosurgeon, Paul Kalanithi notes that neurosurgeons generally won’t perform surgery on individuals with lesions in the language centers of the brain. Language is such an essential capacity of the human experience, and the loss so isolating, so devastating, that many would sooner die than lose the ability. This loss makes Chang’s elegies particularly heartbreaking and Chang plays on the ironies of this loss with skill. The initial shock of the loss evokes Emily Dickinson’s “chill” and “stupor.” “At the hospital, Victoria Chang cried when her father no longer made sense. This was before she understood the cruelty of his disease.”
Chang sets herself the high bar of taking on the form of the elegy itself; it’s not enough to write an elegy, she wants to transform it. While the poetry sometimes echoes Bishop’s “One Art” (“The first of five moves meant the boxes were still optimistic…”) and it sometimes echoes Joan Didion’s beautifully elegiac memoirs, I often found these choices sometimes limited and curious. Rather than feeling personal, the choices seem convenient. Perhaps the author chooses a limited view to prevent overwhelm, but given the bold claims of forging a new form, I expected a deeper engagement with the elegiac tradition.
Still, despite this, I find moments of true luminosity in this work. Chang’s elegies are brute, and brutal, but unflinching in their attempt to capture the brutality of death and dying: her mother’s “panic without oxygen” and descriptions of how her “…mother couldn’t breathe, then took her last breath twenty seconds later” are devastating.
The most beautiful moments are those when the writer loosens into specificity, remembering that “My mother used to collect orange blossoms in a small shallow bowl.” Or when she lets hope creep in: “Scientists now say that a mind still works after the body has died. That there’s a burst of brain energy. Then maybe she heard the geese above disassemble one last time. Then maybe my kiss on her cheek felt like lightning.”
We get the beauty of metaphors detached from the loss—more of Dickinson’s “formal feeling” and “chill” than human and humane comforts. Chang writes: “I put a fish ball in my mouth. My optimism covered the whole ball as if the fish had never died, had never been gutted and rolled into a humiliating shape.”
Chang avoids many direct descriptions of her parents aside from descriptions of their illnesses. Her mother was a mathematician and her father an engineer, but short of a few mentions of mathematics, we don’t really get a clear picture of who these people were in their fullness. Perhaps that’s the point. The loss is total, even in the elegy.
Chang’s imagery and metaphors are seldom drawn from memory, but are detached forms, objects with no ownership. This too is a comment on loss, and a devastatingly beautiful one. The author captures the groundlessness and disassociation of loss with skill.
Chang draws us into the grief, asking that we suffer with her, refusing poetry even as she writes it. She writes: “At the funeral, my brother-in-law kept turning the music down. When he wasn’t looking, I turned the music up. Because I wanted these people to feel what I felt. When I wasn’t looking, he turned it down again. At the end of the day, someone took the monitor and speakers away. But the music was still there. This was my first understanding of grief.” There is the turning away from music and a turning toward it, even when music isn’t wanted. What is wanted is the person lost.
In the end, the poetry is more gothic nightmare than an elegy. There are “dead babies” shaken awake, many instances of darkness descending, ghosts, tombstones, crushed bees.
Ultimately, Chang’s interest in death is intellectual. “Is language the broom or what’s being swept?” Does language create meaning or does meaning create language? “When language leaves, all you have left is tone, all you have left are smoke signals.” Comfort does not come: “How many times have I looked into the sky for some kind of message, only to find content but no form.” At the end of Obit, I feel a bit the same.
About the Writer
Janice Greenwood is a writer, surfer, and poet. She holds an M.F.A. in poetry and creative writing from Columbia University.