Salient [Paperback]

In the foreword to her book-length poem,A riveting lyrical constellation centered on the Battle of Passchendaele in Flanders Fields and tibetan protective magic I found in Grays accomplishment is extraordinary. A vision floats up from the muck, a promise that can only ever be disclosed once we accept that all of life is a preparation for our own personal battlefield oblivion, our own interior Ypres. Finally, the poet must understand herself as the one who is atomized, bereft, and lost in the present, speaking, ultimately, as one of The Missing, begging a maternal god not to depart. Reimagining, here, in historical terms, what psychoanalysis and critical theory understand as the death drive, Elizabeth Gray Jr.s Salient finds the sacred, finds it and returns with it, from just past the outermost bounds of the known. Elizabeth Grays? If Taking as its title a term that describes both critical insight and a devastating battle of World War I, A remarkable work of poetry. Everything invoked is both crystal-clear while yetretaining its crystal mystery. There is a magical accession to the delineationof links and relationships developing in the poem, even the physicalconnections (real or imaginary) when moving from soldier to soldier, woman tosoldier; poet to soldier, woman/poet to lover. Her journey has allowed for the imagery and wisdom of ancient texts and stories to come alive. Extraordinary: Gray concludes this striking work by praying that the goddesses will do what humans never could: just stay. When one thinks of the soldier poets of the First World War  Sassoon, Graves, Owen, and so onone gets drawn into portrayals of dismemberment, gas, rotten leadership. A hundred years later, and a civilian, Gray has to take a more subtle approach. She researched her subject thoroughly; walking through fields to make sense of the battlefield maps, reading the artillery manuals, and pouring over the incident reports. Rather than seeking to answer the question,