The Pilot Star Elegies: Poems

by Sherod Santos

A National Book Award finalist for 1999. The centerpiece of this collection, "Elegy for My Sister," is a sequence of poems on the suicide of the poet's sister in which he gathers, piece by piece, the scattered fragments of his sister's life. In other poems, Santos follows this elegiac theme into the broader contexts of myth and contemporary history to explore the ways each private loss is overlaid by those harrowing conditions by which our century defines itself.

Genres: Poetry

104 pages, Paperback

First published February 1, 1999

Reviews

[Rebecca · Rating 4 out of 5]

I’d not heard of the poet when I picked this up from the Book Thing of Baltimore, drawn in by the title, the cover, and the blurb’s reference to a sequence dedicated to Santos’s sister, who committed suicide. “Elegy for My Sister” is indeed a highlight, though so long as to be diffuse. There’s an elegiac tone to a lot of the rest as well, with the long opener retelling a sobering Hasidic story of a rabbi and his friend at a Ukrainian work camp, plus poems about a student who died of AIDS, an abandoned railway station, and an Orpheus-like character descending into a drug-fuelled sleep. I particularly liked “The Book of Hours,” set on a campus and overlooking a frozen almost-romantic scene from an office window; and “Wing Dike at Low Water.”

Some favorite lines from “Elegy for My Sister”:

“Her life was the story of a long collapse, its end / a dark, unlucky star she’d clung to hopefully”

“Of course, these questions / have no beginning or end, and like posterity / they fuel themselves on a bottomless human vanity: / the illusion that we can ‘know’ someone.”

“And so it continues, day after day, this endless succession of moments culled haphazard from the staticky dark as though each were an event unto itself”

And a very striking repeated sound in “Calypso”: “while the awninged ministers yawned and ate.”

[Katie • forevermorepages · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a hard one to nail down my thoughts about because some poems I struggled connecting to and/or understanding, but this collection also has one of my favorite poems of all time, and I really, really loved the elegy to his sister.

As a collection, it's not perfect, but there is no denying that Sherod Santos is an incredible poet.

[Kalle Wescott · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read /The Pilot Star Elegies/, by Sherod Santos:

https://www.cprw.com/Rother/santos.htm

I read a book of Nicholas Christopher poems today too, and greatly preferred Nicholas Christopher's style and imagery.

[Uther Pendragon · Rating 5 out of 5]

A masterpiece. Sherod Santos is a national treasure. He is one of our greatest living poets.

[Naticia · Rating 3 out of 5]

"Elegy for My Sister" was a standout.

[Angela · Rating 2 out of 5]

In "The Pilot Star Elegies", Sherod Santos offers in four sections various poems all exploring loss in some form or another. But the most significant section, Three, "Elegy For My Sister," deals with his sister's suicide.

He opens the book with "The Story" (in memory of M.L. Rosenthal). It's the story of a man who accidentally received a copy of the book "Hasidic: The Tales of the Holocaust" which was not the book he ordered. Several lines into this poem he says this:

"Nevertheless, in my own stubbornly secular belief that those very books which we need most choose us, and not the other way around."

The story is about the Rabbi of Bluzhov and a friend from Poland who are in a concentration camp. Over the loud speaker, they hear this message: "Each of you who values his miserable life must jump over one of the pits and land on the other side. For those who fail there is a surprise in store." After the message, they hear someone imitating the sounds of a machine gun and then their hear laughter.

The two men approach the pit, close their eyes and jump. When they open their eyes, they are standing on the other side of the pit. The friend cries out "We are here! We are here!"

"Elegy for My Sister," is a sequence of poems on the suicide of his sister. Each poem presents us with various sections of her fragmented and sporadic life. As I was reading this section, I came away with the feeling that perhaps he knew at some point she would do this, not to say that he could have prevented this, but just that her life seemed to have been in pieces for such a long while that perhaps no one was surprised at how it ended. In any case, it is a sad story and a tremendous loss for his family.

The poems in the section are numbered 1 through 25. It is this final poem, number 25, that I found to be very profound:

She was someone about whom people remarked: She never seemed to find a life for herself. Or: Her life was the story of a long collapse, its end a dark, unlucky star she'd clung to hopefully for better or worse. Shortly after her death, we discovered...a large box containing countless bottles of lotions, powders, lipsticks, and oils. Many of them had never been opened, still others had barely been used...it occurred to me the box contained some version of herself, some representation of who she was- a stronger, more serene, more independent self?- that she'd never had the chance to become. Sorting through the contents it occurred to me: She once was becoming; she now ceased to become.

Santos offers us a new way of looking at loss while at the same time sharing his personal experience of losing a loved-one to suicide.

[Kent · Rating 4 out of 5]

It is difficult writing an elegy, and then placing it in the world of contemporary American poetry. What I appreciate about Santos' contribution is his persistent investigation into the narrative that would lead his sister to kill herself. In the book's central poem "Elegy for My Sister," I get a sense that the speaker could sense that this would be the inevitable end. His sister would have to commit suicide, and there was nothing he could do about it. There is a poignancy in this, and it's not about the speaker's grief. It's about his ultimate helplessness to circumstances. I like fitting it with the book's first poem, where the Rabbi of Bluzhov inexplicably escapes the Holocaust. There are some events where there will be no answer to why they happened.