As I set out to write my own, I read many elegies of classic and contemporary poetry, memoir, and hybrid texts with visual art. The elegy is as old as literature itself, but the form has been reinvented again and again in our attempt to make meaning of loss, honor the deceased, and to get as close as we can to conveying the experience of grief—something that thousands of years later remains out of our grasp, just beyond the reaches of language. Here are seven of my favorites.
“You / oh poor (wrongly) brother (wrongly) taken from me,” says the ancient Roman elegy Catullus 101, as translated by Anne Carson for Nox, her own elegy to a brother who died too young. This book object, a box containing a thick stack of unbound accordion-style paper, includes photographs of her brother as a child, and catalogues her attempts at meaning-making—pages with fragments of his biography, portions scribbled out or attached with staples or made only with a pencil’s impression but barely or not legible at all. Carson writes poetry about shadows and muteness, about the origins of words and the elusiveness of history. “For often [history] produces no clear or helpful account,” she writes. Her refrain stays with her reader forever, because it is a tender and resonant refusal to say goodbye: “Nox, frater, nox.”
Your Dazzling Death by Cass Donish
“I’ve never been enough / to save someone with only love,” Cass Donish writes in their heartbreaking poetry collection for poet and partner Kelly Caldwell. Vulnerable, devastating, and full of devotion, these poems travel back and forth in time and across future and past lives, and captivate with their tenderness and bravery. In the middle of the book, a palimpsest with words from Marosa di Giogio’s “History of Violets” called “Kelly in Violet,” declares “I entered her death”—so immersed in their beloved’s death is the speaker, that it becomes a space inhabitable.
The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion
Maybe no book on grief is or will be more enduring than The Year of Magical Thinking, Joan Didion’s memoir of losing her husband to a sudden heart attack while her daughter was comatose with septic shock. How would she weather the fragility of her daughter’s condition in the wake of her beloved’s death? She says, “I remember thinking that I needed to discuss this with John.” Joan Didion is a writer who defined a generation, and this might be her best work.
Obit is a poetry collection comprising some 70 obituaries to everything under the sun—her mother’s teeth, her father’s frontal lobe, the blue dress, voice mail, language, privacy, approval, the future, the clock, the car, civility, optimism, secrets, blame, guilt, memory. She wrote that this book was her “attempt to see if I could get to the bone of grief, to see if I could describe it.” This she does. “Grief scatters. It’s like smoke, it gets in your hair, your clothes, everywhere, but you can’t touch it, and it never really goes away.”
Writer and visual artist, Karen Green, combines words and images in an elegy for her husband who died by suicide. All elegies are impossible—to honor, to represent, to do justice to the one you lost—but her project struck me as even harder, for her subject is for the canonical writer David Foster Wallace, a man who had written so much about the human condition and his own existential unease. She succeeds wonderfully and the book stands firmly on its own, a beautiful and singular expression of love, loss, and the beauty in survival.
What the Living Do: poems by Marie Howe
A stunning and accessible collection of poems that elegize the poet’s late brother, What the Living Do, is a life-affirming take on loss, a book that urges us to stop, look at, and appreciate the texture of our daily life, no matter how mundane or ordinary it may be. It’s not possible to pick a favorite, but midpoint poem, “The Gate,” distills an indelible moment between siblings, standing in the kitchen eating lunch, “This is what you have been waiting for, he used to say to me. / And I’d say, What? // And he’d say, This—holding up my cheese and mustard sandwich. / And I’d say, What? // And he’s say, This, sort of looking around.”
The Guardians: an elegy for a friend by Sarah Manguso
The Guardians is a book for the author’s friend, a young man named Harris, who died jumping in front of a train. Like all of Sarah Manguso’s work, it’s her inimitable voice that creates the story’s propulsion and its magic, that cadence and style all her own, and details unexpected, poignant, and sometimes strange. Every time Manguso publishes a new book, I remember what kind of writer I want to be. The book is heartwrenching but ultimately hopeful; she ends, “I look at him, I look away. I was so lucky.”
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Leigh Lucas is the author of Splashed Things, winner of the A. Poulin Jr Poetry Prize (Boa Editions, 2026), and Landsickness (Tupelo Press, 2024), selected by Chen Chen for the 2023 Sunken Garden Poetry Chapbook Award. The recipient of residencies from Tin House, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and the Kenyon Review Writers Workshop, her writing can be found in Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day, Adroit, Smartish Pace, and elsewhere. She holds a BA from Stanford and an MFA from Warren Wilson. She lives in San Francisco, CA.