American Poetry, Sonnets

Kyrie: Poems

Name: Kyrie: Poems
Author: Ellen Bryant Voigt
ISBN: 9780393315615

by Ellen Bryant Voigt, Voight, Ellen Voight

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Overview

"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.

Synopsis

In this mosaic of sonnets, Ellen Bryant Voigt takes on a monumental challenge: to conjure up the influenza pandemic of 1918-19, a harrowing but little-recorded event in history. Over twenty-five million lives were lost worldwide, half a million in the United States alone. Focusing first on a family and then branching out, Voigt includes the voices of a soldier writing home, his schoolteacher fiancee, orphaned children, bereft husbands and wives. As seasons pass, the separate voices accumulate into one vast, almost Biblical story: the report of a community in the grip of mounting, untreatable contagion. "How we survived: we locked the doors / and let nobody in". Kyrie is a tour de force of imagination grounded in history, with overtones for our own time of plague.