‘he tree which everyone knows / cannot grow this far north / being Mediterranean’ summons theįrom the hand of a man who escaped his country In the collection’s opening poem, ‘To the Fig Tree on 9 th and Christian,’ the tree, in its gorgeous and steadfast vitality, gathers the strangers who have come to gather its fruit. Often, life insists its blooming way into the world. Which is to say, / in other words, just being alive.’ ‘y mother’s sadness…/…/a form of gratitude’ the speaker in ‘Ending the Estrangement’ realizes, a sentiment reprised more capaciously in ‘The Opening’: ‘…-just sadness. But where the elegy in its classical form seeks to grant consolation, the ode is a ritual of awe gratitude, an ethic of paying attention that can offer respite without setting to rest. In poetic terms: the elegy and ode are twinned. That the body exists in time means all acts of love are a tending for loss. Loss is not felt in the absence of love.” If there is no grief without love, neither is there love without grief. “Perhaps,” the poet Elizabeth Alexander writes in her memoir The Light of the World, “tragedies are only tragedies in the presence of love, which confers meaning to loss. Of all the strings thrummed by the thumb of Gay’s language, it is Girmay’s ‘Elegy’ that I can’t stop hearing. The tenderness of bringing breath to language is breath leaving the body. The act of buttoning and unbuttoning a shirt gives rise to a meditation on the hand’s other gentlest pursuits: these same fingers securing the garment as those with which ‘I will/one day close my mother’s eyes’ and give ‘the raft…/to the clumsy spider,’ so that as the slim poem slips to a close-‘we practice like this…/sliding the bones home’-there is a conflation between the bones of the shirt and the bones of the body, between the rehearsal and the act. As their titles make clear, Gay’s odes dwell in the ordinary, but in the poems’ vast ecologies, the quotidian surges toward the cosmological. Crocuses and bees and bagpipes and ‘the quick and gentle flocking / of men to the old lady falling down’ are sanctified by the brush and burrow of thankfulness. There are, of course, odes: “Ode to Buttoning and Unbuttoning My Shirt,” “Ode to the Flute,” “Ode to Sleeping in My Clothes,” “Ode to Drinking Water from My Hands”-not to mention the other poems not bearing the label, but nonetheless awash with gratitude. There are no elegies in Ross Gay’s Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude. The following book review concerns Ross Gay’s latest collection, Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude (University of Pittsburgh Press, February 2015). Ross Gay is the author three books of poetry: Against Which, Bringing the Shovel Down, and, most recently, Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude.
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