The Elegy Beta

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Mischa Willett
Mockingbird Books

A Poetry Collection

A second collection from the poet of Phases, Mischa Willett writes at the crossing of devotion and daily life with a learned, comic, and unsparing music.

In The Elegy Beta, Willett answers Rilke’s Duino Elegies with a sequence that is homage and improvisation at once, while surrounding poems take up the ordinary weather of a life: names, fonts, restaurants, the dead who remain nevertheless a cloud of witnesses. The book moves between kitchen-table perception and the ancient work of angels, asking what praise can still do when the world keeps going away.

Both playful and exacting, this striking and deeply moving collection balances irreverence with profound seriousness and abiding joy.

  • "An absolutely distinctive voice, angular, refractory, often unsettling in flashes of psychological and spiritual insights...A remarkable volume."

    David Lyle Jeffrey

  • "Dwell in the lilt of Willett's play. He's dead serious and death-defying."

    James K.A. Smith

  • "Displays the capacity of poetic language to remind us of the world--its everyday glory and profound peculiarity--that gets lost in the noise."

    Brett McCracken

  • "Here is a striking and original collection which responds to both our biblical and poetic heritage with a fresh contemporary voice."

    Malcom Guite

Sample Poems

  • Come crack the frozen
    branch-ends that’ve had you so long
    penned up as in winter-trap,
    snow-drift, tree-sap. 

    Have the whole Earth heave
    and scream at your verdant birth;
    bring in your train the bright green
    lips of leaves, the lengthening day,
    the suggestion of sex, a mess;
    wreck the hard and frostbitten ground
    with your trillion shoots; break through, 
    crown, come in like a tooth
    into a world sore, into the ache; 

    come save the stupid, drooped
    stems of our hearts before they wilt;
    by the Earth’s cataclysmic tilt,
    Primavera, evergreen hope,
    get here.

  • Sun struck aspen and strikes still

    February slant light. Morning chill.

    These northern latitudes exude aura

    the deepish tilt makes grey rose rose gold

    Aurora feasible borealis only here

    and maybe same in the south southern

    hemisphere. Who knows? Irises up

    too soon, suffer for over eager

    will no pollinating eager bee ever

    visit. Dead, they. Right? Each winter?

    All only a season old? Can it (even queen?)

    be? Not for any of us more by much:

    re-learn the honey-stung comb box

    and waxy pattern. Also flight noise summer

    scent the prick sweet pang of waiting.

Order the collection

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