by Julia St. John
In Elisa Gonzalez’s debut poetry collection Grand Tour, the speaker’s travel through different locations—including Poland, Cyprus, and, in memory, the landscapes of her childhood—stages a vivid series of backdrops for another kind of travel: toward and around knowledge, other people, and her own desires—and through the speaker’s grappling with the untimely death of her younger brother.
“I am somewhere between visitor and a pilgrim, I haven’t decided,” the speaker says of Cyprus in the poem “Notes on a Divided Island” (13), but this ambivalence of position returns in other ways in the book as well. In “Failed Essay on Privilege,” Gonzalez writes,
My parents didn’t speak money, didn’t speak college.
Still—I went to Yale.
For a while I tried to condemn.
I wrote, Let me introduce you to evil.
Still, I was a guest there, I made myself at home.
(9)
This in-between-ness, this at times reluctant embrace of complexity, echoes in the language in Grand Tour. “Failed Essay” acknowledges failure in its title—that this was supposed to be one thing, and in failing ended up as something else—and by doing so lays itself bare to the reader. In a similar way, the collection’s opening poem, “Notes Toward an Elegy,” acknowledges its eternal incompletion: not an elegy, but the notes toward it. The word choice there is telling, too: it’s not “Notes For an Elegy,” but “Toward an Elegy”—here, the elegy is less something built than it is something reached for.
This kind of transparency thrums throughout the book: Gonzalez is not a poet interested in obscuring, in performing magic tricks. “Reader,” she says at the end of her “Roman Triptych,” “I want you to know you are reading a poem. // What is the point of talking otherwise?” (12). The poems in Grand Tour achieve authenticity not by shying away from complex syntax or musicality, but rather by embracing them in the relentless pursuit of poetics. And it is a book of exacting musicality, full of lines that sing: “All furred in crystal, everywhere / the extravagant declaration of ice,” the speaker says of a hawthorn tree “felled” by the titular storm of the poem “The Ice Storm” (57).
The title’s ironic invocation of the historical Grand Tour interacts with multiple themes that run through the collection, the speaker’s physical travels included. Perhaps what the historical Tour—which was accessible only to wealthy young European men—calls to mind most immediately is exclusivity, and, of course, exclusivity is not something that resides only in history, but in the present as well. In Grand Tour, we see a speaker in pursuit of knowledge and in unapologetic embrace of her own sexual desires—both things that, under patriarchal norms, are thought of the male domain, guarded by exclusivity, not unlike the Tour.
For much of the collection, we see a woman experience and enjoy both her own intellect and sexuality, a vision important for how it testifies to reality. At times, too, there are more direct confrontations with the norms around women’s desires, as in the poem “Secrets and Invisible Folds into the Visible,” which ends with the speaker’s acknowledgement that sexual desire is stereotyped as masculine: “But I have a young man’s mind,” she says, “deranged with desire” (40). In several of the poems, we’re shown how the strict religious community the speaker was raised in fueled an estrangement from sexuality: “on the night train from Gdansk,” the speaker thinks: “Forgive me, that I have a body—a thought I’ve had many times. / My father, who hated my body, asks me to stand—no,” she realizes, “it’s the conductor talking” (65-66). But we, as readers, are gifted with the witness of the speaker’s arrival at a sexuality of joy and abundance. In “Roman Triptych,” Gonzalez writes,
I hold her naked on the carpet,
my body spilling
out of my lavender dress.
Body, if you could be forever
spilling out of your lavender dress.
(11)
Another central concern in Grand Tour is the intellect, its possibilities and its failures. In one poem, the speaker hears a stranger on the street shouting, “What do you know? What do you even know?” (41) and though the question is not directed toward her, it’s an external mirror of the questioning she directs toward herself. Even as she admits that she desires “such knowledge from this world that if age one day empties my mind / I sometimes think I’d be grateful,” (31), she remains compulsively in pursuit of knowledge of subjects as disparate and high stakes as death, love, and language itself. “It always comes back to knowledge with us, doesn’t it?” she asks a younger self with wry affection (47).
For Gonzalez’s speaker, the intellect is a way toward other people, as well as toward her own self. She turns to the Iliad as she mourns the death of her brother. She thinks over Turkish’s aorist tense in a poem addressing a lover, and contemplates the death of Ophelia during quarantine. At times, the speaker recognizes, these bids for connection remain incomplete, or imperfect. Still, in the midst of imperfection and incompletion, Gonzalez finds room for hope and desire to persist. In Grand Tour, Gonzalez has written a collection that is both tender and confrontational, intricate and direct. It’s an achievement of a book, and a true pleasure to read.
