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
A riveting lyrical constellation centered on the Battle of Passchendaele in Flanders Fields and Tibetan protective magic
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.
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
When one thinks of the soldier poets of the First World War – Sassoon, Graves, Owen, and so on—one 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, how was it? she asks us to consider how can we know?
— Fergus Smith, Journal of Veterans Studies
Gray’s 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.
— Hyperallergic
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.
