There’s a raw and sinewy energy to Elisa Gonzalez’s line. Her debut collection, Grand Tour, clarified and found its final form in the years after her brother was shot to death. So it is a first book and also a shattered elegy, an announcement and an aftermath, by turns impassioned and dispassionate as it registers grief in many forms. It begins with “Notes Toward an Elegy,”
The Cypriot sun is impatient, a woman undressed
who can’t spare the time to dress, so light
like a vitrine holds even a storm.
One day in the Old City, a pineapple rain.
And I’m on my way home from the pharmacy, carrying my little bag of cures.
Refuge at the café in the nameless square.
Nihal brings espresso poured over ice, turns off the music.
We listen to rain fall through the light until the end.
That’s the end of the stanza and the rain but the beginning of the poem and the book. It’s as if the poet’s point of departure is the place where two Yeatsian gyres meet just as they go their separate ways:
