Mourning and Recovery in Tess Gallagher's Moon Crossing Bridge (1992

Becoming the basis for psychoanalytical examination and analysis of grief, Freud's essay "Mourning and Melancholia" aptly explains these two modes. Critics like Peter Sacks and Jahan Ramazani have appropriated Freud's work to study the elegy, the former developing a " normative (i.e., restitutive, idealizing) model while the latter adopting a melancholic (violent, recalcitrant)" one. This paper argues that in the contemporary American poet Tess Gallagher's Moon Crossing Bridge (1992), a volume written after the death of her lover and husband the well-known writer Raymond Carver (1938-1988), Sacks' paradigm of the mourner's movement from loss to consolation and Ramazani's paradigm of violent mourning overlap, though Sacks' paradigm persists to the end. She displays an interplay between melancholic and consolatory mourning, some of her poems tend more in one direction, others move dialectically between the two. Her move from her initial numbness to her decision to resume her life as a human being and as a poet shows that her elegies express the various stages of her grief though not in a definitely ordered sequence (only occupying herself literally with her lover's body and her visit to his grave may seem to follow a logical sequence). To emerge from her grief, Gallagher works through complicated feelings of attachment, loss, and bereavement until she becomes "free and uninhibited again." She is driven to bear her sorrow alone, and her experience of grief comes to be sometimes bizarre, oftentimes pathetic,but strongly painful. She repeatedly confronts loss, anger and denial, recapitulates her relationship with Carver, creates an internal satisfactory image of him, and finally giving him up to the larger forces of nature. She shows elements essential to mourning such as becoming aware of the reality of loss, confronting anger, recollecting and then severing attachment to her dead lover, reckoning with substitutive signs of him