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Although as a response to the New Cross and Grenfell Tower fires Jay Bernard's collection Surge (2019) engages with the themes of loss and mourning, no critical attempt has been made to approach this complex sequence of poems from the perspective of the poetic elegy. This paper argues that reading Surge as a neo-elegy sheds light on Bernard's intervention in current discourses on the grievability of Black lives in order to carry out their work of mournful protest. I intend to show the ways in which Surge endorses and enhances the ethico-political purpose and innovative expansiveness – regarding time, voice, and place – that characterize the contemporary Black elegy to address the past and ongoing struggles of the Black British community. Even if rooted in British postcolonial history, Bernard's project in Surge resonates with the concerns of the Black Lives Matter global movement and the body of Black elegiac poetry developing around it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay argues that "The lamentacion of a Gentilwoman vpon the death of her late deceased frend William Gruffith Gent." in The Gorgeous Gallery of Gallant Inventions (1578), attributed to Isabella Whitney, is a witty reimagining of one of the most popular Renaissance literary genres: the epitaph. The poet's grief revolves around the personal consequences of her secret lover's death, handling stock phrases and situational irony to strangely moving effect. While the poem's first-person speaker invokes the epitaph only to repudiate it, the three quatrains framing the text (written in the third person and therefore generally attributed to the volume's editor Thomas Proctor), pins down the mourning presence with the epitaphic "here." This paper suggests single authorship of the doubled text by showing how the poem posits personal lament as the site of interment located by the spatial demonstrative "here," to fashion a poetics of closure in which the voice of the languishing female poet becomes, through linguistic and textual splitting, a living epitaph for the dead beloved. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]