A labor of love applying extraordinary vision to documents of war, Liz Gray’s Salient sharpens the details of the record, even while broadening the record’s range. Taking as her occasion the battle of Ypres in World War I (and, in a signature move, introducing elements of Tantric figuration into the textual design), Gray interweaves analytic and lyric threads — microcosm with macrocosm, explication with implication, scholarship with song. The patterns cross conventional lines — time lines, gender lines, genre lines, lines of authority. Earth in the body, language in the jaw-hinge, spirit in the air — they all occasion insight…. But Gray concludes this striking work by praying that the goddesses will do what humans never could: Just stay.

Heather McHugh

Elizabeth T. Gray, Jr.

Elizabeth T. Gray, Jr., born in Boston, Massachusetts, is the author of the poetry collection Series | India. Her celebrated translations from classical and contemporary Persian include Wine and Prayer: Eighty Ghazals from the Díwán of Hafiz, The Green Sea of Heaven: Fifty Ghazals from the Díwán of Hafiz, and Iran: Poems of Dissent.

cover image of the book Salient

Salient

by Elizabeth T. Gray, Jr.

With a contribution by Nathaniel Tarn

In the foreword to her book-length poem Salient, Elizabeth Gray writes, “This work began by juxtaposing two obsessions of mine that took root in the late 1960s: the Battle of Passchendaele, fought by the British Army in Flanders in late 1917, and the chöd ritual, the core ‘severance’ practice of a lineage founded by Machik Lapdrön, the great twelfth-century female Tibetan Buddhist saint.” Over the course of several decades, Gray tracked the contours and traces of the Ypres Salient, walking the haunted battlefield ground of the contemporary landscape with campaign maps in hand, reading “not only history, poetry, and fiction, but also unit diaries; contemporary reports and individual accounts; survey information and maps of all kinds; treatises on aerial photography and artillery tactics; and manuals on field engineering and tactical planning.” Out of this material, through a process of collage, convergence, and ritual chöd visualization, Gray has composed a spare, fascinating, lyrical engagement with the Missing, in shell hole and curved trench, by way of amulets and obstacles. What is salient rises from the secret signs in song, like a blessing, protected from harm.

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cover image of the book Let Us Believe in the Beginning of the Cold Season

Let Us Believe in the Beginning of the Cold Season

In the years since her tragic death in a car accident at age thirty-two in 1967, Forough Farrokhzad has become a poet as influential as Lorca or Akhmatova, celebrated as a feminist trailblazer of Iranian literature and as an iconoclastic figure of contemporary world literature. As Mehdi Jami writes in the Guardian, “In every culture you have cultural icons, like Shakespeare in Britain. Farrokhzad was like that for contemporary Iran, someone who formed the identity of our contemporariness.”

Thoughtfully curated and deftly translated by the poet Elizabeth T. Gray, Jr., this selected poems gathers work from Farrokhzad’s whole writing life, early to late, including the entirety of her posthumous book Let Us Believe in the Beginning of the Cold Season, which gives this collection its name. Readers can thoroughly treasure this expansive poet of desire and loss, of classical reinvention, of lexical variation and sonic beauty, of terrifying wisdom, hope, and grief.

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A labor of love applying extraordinary vision to documents of war, Liz Gray’s Salient sharpens the details of the record, even while broadening the record’s range. Taking as her occasion the battle of Ypres in World War I (and, in a signature move, introducing elements of Tantric figuration into the textual design), Gray interweaves analytic and lyric threads — microcosm with macrocosm, explication with implication, scholarship with song. The patterns cross conventional lines — time lines, gender lines, genre lines, lines of authority. Earth in the body, language in the jaw-hinge, spirit in the air — they all occasion insight…. But Gray concludes this striking work by praying that the goddesses will do what humans never could: Just stay.

Heather McHugh

I found in Salient something of a Whitman-like spirit. The poem will not let you go under. You may have to hold on with all your strength, but it is important that you make it across.

Harvard Review

Let me begin this review by stating unequivocally that Elizabeth Gray’s Salient is a masterpiece, by which I simply mean that it is a work of the utmost poetic accomplishment. Deeply rooted in modernism, especially in terms of technique, it is also one of the most original books of poetry I have encountered in quite some time.

Norm Finkelstein

If _Salien_t were fiction, I’d compare it to Sebald or the early experimental work of Ondaatje. Like them, Gray considers rather than presents history. Like their work, her consideration does not lead to a _re-_presentation of history but, like the chöd ritual, to a dismemberment of the self. In poetry, Charles Olson comes to mind. Gray’s individualistic approach to history is what allows her lyric voice to disappear through poetic ritual

Devin King, Rhino

A remarkable work of poetry. Everything invoked is crystal-clear while yet retaining its crystal mystery. There is a magical accession to the delineation of links and relationships developing in the poem, even the physical connections (real or imaginary) when moving from solider to solider, woman to solider, poet to solider, woman/poet to lover.

Nathaniel Tarn

With a fierce and elegant intelligence, Elizabeth T. Gray Jr. has made herself present within the most spectacularly deadly landscape in modernity, the Ypres Salient, and has found, in that place of epic annihilation, that divinities are there, and that courage is possible, and that there is a way for us all to pass through oblivion, and live. Radiant in its chill particulars, this extraordinary book-length poem is in life, of life, but also beyond life, by turns terrifying and ecstatic in the transfigurations it reports.

Joseph Donahue

Taking as its title a term that describes both critical insight and a devastating battle of World War I, Salient is a work of lyric investigation and recovery. Elizabeth Gray mines field manuals, trench maps, soldiers’ diaries, and officers’ reports—seeking a language that can confront the horrors of modern warfare. Addressing a guiding query—“how could one imagine this?”—Gray marries painfully precise historical accounts of the Western Front with the language and practice of Eastern protective magic. In so doing, the poet finds the “portions of this evidence which are obviously song.

Nancy Kuhl

Her journey has allowed for the imagery and wisdom of ancient texts and stories to come alive.

Dana Johnson, The Rumpus
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