cover image Inventions of Farewell: A Collection of Elegies

Inventions of Farewell: A Collection of Elegies

. W. W. Norton & Company, $50 (480pp) ISBN 978-0-393-04972-5

Co-author of The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the 19th-Century Literary Imagination and author of the recent Kissing the Bread: New and Selected Poems 1969-1999, Sandra M. Gilbert has here assembled Inventions of Farewell: A Collection of Elegies. She divides the poems among sections entitled ""Watching: Visions of the Dying and the Dead,"" ""`In the Chill of the Body': Viewing the Dead,"" ""`How To Perform Funeral': Ceremonies of Separation"" and ""Grieving: Lamentation for the Dead,"" among others, and includes a section of ""`Laments for the Makers': Poets Mourning Other Poets"": Johnson on Shakespeare, Bishop on Lowell, Sexton on Plath, Hayden on Dunbar, Crane on Melville, and others.