“My idea of you”: Enduring Elegy in Karen McCarthy Woolf’s An Aviary of Small Birds
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.26754/ojs_misc/mj.202611916Keywords:
elegy, maternal bereavement, mourning, Karen McCarthy Woolf, lossAbstract
This article explores Karen McCarthy Woolf’s An Aviary of Small Birds as a sequence of maternal elegies of loss that mourn the stillbirth of her son, Otto. Through a close reading and a formal analysis of the collection, I examine how the poems articulate the often-silenced experience of motherhood without child, portraying grief as an enduring presence rather than a process with closure. The collection resists conventional narratives of healing, instead embodying the complexities of maternal bereavement. By engaging with poetic form, imagery and language, McCarthy Woolf’s work redefines elegy, bearing witness to the persistence of loss and the impossibility of resolution.
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