Mary Jo Bang sits on a gray sofa in the comfortable living room of her apartment in a distinguished old building in the Central West End. She wears her rich, dark hair long. Her face is pale.

The apartment is full of books and paintings and old pieces of wood furniture with distressed paint. She is particularly proud of a print by Dorothea Tanner, which the surrealist inscribed to her. Behind her through a large bay window are the leafless trees of Forest Park and, beyond them, the towers of Clayton.

"I can actually see Brookings Hall at night, but you have to know exactly where to look," she says. "Living here, I can't escape Washington University."

Actually, Washington University was a hard-won achievement for Bang, who is director of its highly regarded Creative Writing Program.

Bang is a poet who has published five volumes of verse. "Elegy," published last year, is a finalist for a National Book Critics Circle Award. She'll be in New York when the award winners are announced Thursday.

Although she's proud of the nomination, she says, "I'd give anything not to have written that book. It wasn't a choice on my part — this is work that comes about because it insists itself into the world."

The poems were a response to the death of her 37-year-old son. But Bang's life has rarely been easy or simple.

A local girl, she grew up poor in Ferguson.

"When I was a child, Washington University seemed like Camelot, something unattainable," Bang says.

"My mother was a stay-at-home mother, my stepfather was a truck driver. Neither had more than a seventh-grade education. There were no books in the house, no art, the only music (was) records we got as promotionals from Kroger's. When my sister would clean the house, she would put on the 'William Tell Overture.'"

She found her escape.

"The bookmobile came through, and I discovered books," Bang says. "When I was 7 and my sister was 10, we would walk to the local library, and I'd carry back as many books as I could.

"Books became an alternative universe for me. In addition to well-written books — somehow I knew instinctively what good writing was — I would take out fashion books. I so badly wanted to escape that world, and I wanted to know how to dress and act once I was out of there.

"When I asked my mother if I could go to college, she says, 'No. We can barely afford to put food on the table. If anyone goes to college, it will be your brother. He'll have a family to support, you'll just get married.'"

Bang, who was born Mary Jo Ward in 1946, did go to college. And she did get married.

She attended McCluer High School, where she says she got little guidance about the future.

"I thought about applying to the University of Missouri, but I wanted to reinvent myself, go someplace I wasn't known," Bang says.

She went to the University of Iowa, but stayed only a semester, returning to St. Louis, where she was a reservations clerk for TWA. The next year she went to Mizzou, where she studied art history. She stayed there only two semesters.

From then on, Bang's academic history is one of going to one school after another, getting one degree after another. She has bachelor's and master's degrees in sociology from Northwestern, a physician assistant degree from St. Louis University, a bachelor of fine arts degree in photography from the Polytechnic of Central London and a master's of fine arts in poetry from Columbia University.

"I was always an overachiever," Bang says with a mixture of modesty and humor.

Columbia and New York were turning points.

"It was heady living in New York in the 1990s," she says. "I was dazzled. There were so many poetry events. You would go to a reading, meet the poet, go out for drinks later."

Bang won a book contest in 1996, and her first book, "Apology for Want," was published.

The degrees tell only one part of Bang's story, though. She worked with a Quaker group in Philadelphia for two years doing anti-war work. (The war then was in Vietnam.) She was a physician assistant for eight years in Chicago, having done her internship at a Washington University HMO.

She lived in Chicago, London, St. Louis and New York. She married twice. And she had a child.

That child, Michael Donner Van Hook, died in 2004 of an accidental prescription-drug overdose. He is the subject of "Elegy."

"Writing those poems, I came to understand why people write elegies," Bang says. "One of their uses seems to be to keep the person alive in the world. I was aware from the beginning that I was keeping a conversation going with someone I was talking with for 37 years. Now, because of that event, I needed all the more to talk with him.

"At the end, you know that you have not kept that person alive. An elegy is a way of distracting yourself from lacerating grief."

The book, which was written in the year after Bang's son's death, has been well, even extravagantly, received. In a Post-Dispatch review, Aaron Belz wrote:

"In it, the carefully stitched and textured fabric of (Bang's) previous poetry billows into a sorrow only a grieving parent truly knows but that all readers will recognize as an essential part of human experience."

David Orr, chairman of the NBCC's poetry committee, says: "What's interesting about 'Elegy' is the balance achieved between an intensely personal subject and craft. The book is not just a series of elegies, but a consideration of the genre of elegy itself. I think the readers on the jury were most impressed by her achieving that difficult balance."

"Elegy" is a heartbreaking read. One after another, the 64 poems anatomize a grief that will never end. As the poems circle back to cover territory already explored but never truly escaped, they simultaneously move on to address other aspects of pain.

Bang says that she didn't set out to write a book of elegies but that when she did, she set the arbitrary date of one year as the point to cut them off.

Bang has written two new volumes: "The Bride of E" will be published next year by Graywolf Press; "Amnesia," a prose-poem thriller set in St. Louis, is being offered to publishers.

The poems in "Elegy" are accessible to a sensitive reader, but Bang has a reputation for being a difficult poet.

"Difficulty is an interesting word when used in connection with poetry," she says. "One of the elements of poetry is ambiguity. So, the question becomes how 'ambiguous' should one be. Differences in style depend on how one uses ambiguity. Some readers might want less, some more.

"I have always written for the kind of reader I am. At the same time, I hope that readers will find something on the surface that makes them come back to read the poem again, to try to get below that surface."

Bang returned to St. Louis to teach at Washington University in 2000, and she became director of its Creative Writing Program in 2005.

"I feel very grateful to have started out this late — I was 48 when I entered the M.F.A. program at Columbia — and be allowed to participate and receive the kind of attention I have," she says. "When I think about where I started, to think that I now teach at Camelot — I marvel at it."

dbonetti@post-dispatch.com | 314-340-8351