grand tour

I know (or, rather, knew) Elisa Gonzalez exclusively from her poem "After My Brother's Death, I Reflect on the Iliad", which is nothing short of unforgettable (you can read it here, and you absolutely should). It's one of my favorite poems of the last few years, not to mention one of my favorite pieces of classical reception ever.

This left me with extremely high hopes for her debut collection, Grand Tour, which ended up being a bit of a disappointment. Not because it wasn't good (it was!) but because the only thing in it that quite got to the level of "After My Brother's Death" was, well, "After My Brother's Death." And my impression isn't exactly fair, given that a positively electric poem about grief competently utilizing references to the Iliad and Cy Twombly and Zbigniew Herbert is going to be pretty fucking difficult to match, much less beat, especially in my book.

Honestly, it reminded me a little of Anne Carson's Short Talks in that it was disappointing not for any inherent failure, but rather because my favorite poem(s) ended up being the one(s) I'd already read. In no other circumstance could I be disappointed by a collection that features one poem about the aorist^[1] that's actually about a strained relationship and another where an episode from Tacitus' Annales is connected to the triangulation of desire and also Petrarch is there. And besides small nerd joys like those, Gonzalez also consistently comes out swinging with extremely evocative bits of imagery and turns of phrase, like "tessellating yellow/and pink like a ballerina’s tulle" ("Weather Journal, Warsaw") and "The silhouettes who slide from the wall live otherwise as cypresses, nightjars on the wind" ("It Took Dominion Everywhere") and "A thick succession of portents" ("What Happens").

tl;dr: the collection is good, but I can't quite wholeheartedly recommend it; however, if you haven't read "After My Brother's Death", do.

(Also, for some reason, I couldn't stop thinking of Eliza Griswold's "Ruins" while reading this. "Every hard bulb stirs.")

1. An ancient Greek...you know what? Let's just call it a tense.^{^}