Singer, an Elegy

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Singer, An Elegy is a long poem memorializing Mr. Fetherling's father and, equally, the now-obsolete industrial culture that shaped him. The poem reveals one man as a father, but also as a man who came of age during the Depression and was moulded accordingly. Just as importantly, it plays with the elegy form, which enjoyed a morbid vogue in the 18th and 19th centuries. The elegy needs revitalizing and updating now that societal changes of various kinds, including the composition of families, mean that we metabolize grief differently than our ancestors did. Singer, An Elegy has rhetorical lightning flashes but aspires to, and achieves, a much greater straightforwardness than Fetherling's previous poetry.