Kyrie: Poems
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | 4.93 (502 Votes) |
| Asin | : | 0393315614 |
| Format Type | : | paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 80 Pages |
| Publish Date | : | 2013-11-04 |
| Language | : | English |
DESCRIPTION:
She lives in Vermont and teaches in the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. Ellen Bryant Voigt is the author of volumes of poetry, including Shadow of Heaven, a finalist for the National Book Award, and Messenger, a finalist for the National Book Award and for the Pulitzer Prize. Voigt was awarded the O. . Hardison, Jr. B. Prize
"Voigt's language dares to stir the dead, to remind us that we are temporary survivors."Geoffrey Wolff In this mosaic of sonnets, her fifth collection, Ellen Bryant Voigt takes on a monumental challenge: to conjure up the influenza pandemic of 1918-19, a little-recorded event that killed 25 million worldwide, half a million in America alone. The Nation calls Kyrie "an astonishing collection so spare and tightly woven, yet so mindful of the cadences of the speaking voice, that the poems read like verse drama." Starting with the family, Voigt creates voices that gather into one vast community story, a "true tour de force" (Boston Sunday Globe) that speaks to our own time of plague.
"Once the world had its fill of war" Kyrie, Ellen Voigt's 1995 collection of poems, takes the Influenza Epidemic of 1918-1919 as its inspiration. Voigt's narrative poems create distinct characters (the members of a rural American family) in order to illustrate the suffering and the small redemptions of the winter of 1918-1919. The poems are written as letters, prayers, songs, and even sorrowful curses as the daily life and the inner thoughts of various family members are explored. One poem beautifully describes a bed used by the family: "Th. ChapLynn said 1918, Influenza, War, Love and Loss. This small book of poems tells a story of family, birth and death, the 1918 plague and World War I. It is the only book of poetry I have read that weaves a story in and out of separate poems linked together through time, place and space. A truly lovely book, to best be read in the quiet, front to back and if you respond anything like I did, you'll be changed. Ellen Bryant Voight is a master poet, well worth spending time with.. "Beautiful, but missing something" according to J. Edgar Mihelic, MBA. This slim little volume did not stick in my mind. I do not know what it is, but I had trouble with it. Part of the problem may be its brevity. I was finished the book before I realized it was started. The main thing though, is that with poetry, I prefer the lyric. If I am reading something that is a narrative cycle, I forget that I am reading poetry, especially if there are not red herring, end stopped rhymes. I then start to read the narrative as a very close cousin of prose, and judge it on the merits
Associations are carried through powerful imagery. Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc. . In this book-length sequence Voigt (Two Trees) develops a portrait in mosaic of the 1918-1919 influenza epidemic, set against the backdrop of WWI. Seldom have panic and despair been depicted so lyrically. From Publishers Weekly Kyrie eleison-Lord have mercy. Early in the book, when her sister dreams of dead animals with human faces, the teacher assumes her fiance has been injured: "I didn't know/it was us she saw in the bloody trenches." Voigt uses several voices, most not precisely identified; readers become major players, joining or separating the speakers at will. Modern poets as diverse as John Berryman and Ted Berrigan have explored the sonnet form, but these mostly expanded verses add new dimensions. A young schoolteacher and her fiance, a soldier, ar