on Elisa Gonzalez

An Uncanny Voice

‘Sometimes it really is for nothing / that you have to live’, the poet declares in ‘To My Thirteen-Year-Old Self’. Grand Tour is, in part, an encounter with tragedy: Gonzalez’s brother, Stephen, was murdered at the age of twenty-one, while Gonzalez was at work on this collection. In her grief, she added new poems of greater length and gravitas to the manuscript, including ‘In Quarantine, I Reflect on the Death of Ophelia’, a work of long, brave thoughts:

and if even so your death remains forgivable
then what questions should I ask? All I have is sleeplessness and rage.

‘There is in Gonzalez’s nature something volcanic,’ writes Louise Glück – ‘a sense of fire originating at a very great depth.’ If rage is welcomed, so too is the wisdom to acknowledge it. Yet even that wisdom undergoes illuminating inquiry: speaking of the fortune she had to attend Yale, the poet remarks with irony, ‘I paid so much / for wisdom and look at all of this, look at all I have – ’ The poem concludes here, in amusing silence.

While Grand Tour works to make sense of suffering, it also resists control: much of the writing thinks freshly on the page; there is nothing here too tidy. Long, searching sentences sculpt the speaker’s psyche: ‘sleeplessness and rage’ isno answer, it’s not even a thought, though it might not
end till my body does,
perhaps not even then, as I can imagine it going on past my ending, and really –
what more suitable ghost could I leave behind?

These extended ...