Kyrie: Poems [Paperback]

Ellen Bryant Voigt (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 17, 1996

"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.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Kyrie eleison-Lord have mercy. 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. A young schoolteacher and her fiance, a soldier, are the principal speakers in these loosely structured sonnets; in the teacher's voice, Voigt finds a form to embody compassion driven out by fear. Associations are carried through powerful imagery. 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.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Review

[M]ajestic. . . . Voigt inhabits, rather than simply 'tells,' the story of this great, but largely neglected epilogue to the Great War. (Commonweal )

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Product Details

• Paperback: 80 pages
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company; Reprint edition (September 17, 1996)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0393315614
• ISBN-13: 978-0393315615
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.8 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 4.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #541,605 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

13 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars "Once the world had its fill of war", June 15, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: Kyrie: Poems (Hardcover)

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: "This is the double bed where she'd been born,/ bed of her mother's marriage and decline,/ bed her sisters also ripened in,/ bed that drew her husband to her side..."

Other poems deal with marriage and piano-playing, as well as hogs and chickens. Voigt is truly a master of the narrative poem; these untraditional, free-verse sonnets are musical and wry. What other contemporary poet can riff on hogs "Hogs aren't pretty but they're smart,/ and clean as you let them be" AND write such good metaphors: "We rode the mule to lessons, birds on a branch--/you know what it means to have your own piano?"

Voigt's illustration of a lesser-known chapter of American history is profoundly written, and her characters are inviting. Any reader will enjoy Kyrie.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Satisfied customer, April 25, 2011

By 

Mary J. Pohl - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Kyrie: Poems (Paperback)

Perfect transaction. These poems are haunting in tone. The subject matter is timely.

(The poet lived on my floor our freshman year of college!)

Thanks!

0 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Beautiful, but comes across as false, June 14, 2010

By 

J. Edgar Mihelic "Iconoclast" (Chicago) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Kyrie: Poems (Paperback)

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 of its storytelling ability. This is where "Kyrie" fails for me. The narrative is not tight enough to draw me into the world of the grippe espagnol and all its horrible aftermath.

That said, included in the volume are some very strong individual poems that I was drawn to, but to take a single poem from this cycle is to take it out of context and alienate it from the rest of its sisters in the story.

As a poet and a writer, I have to applaud these individual poems that stand out, and give Voigt the credit for doing as well as she did within the limitations that she set for herself in the designing of the book. She uses a subverted sonnet form in cycles to try to unfold a story that was almost universal at the time, and now almost commonly forgotten. The problem I have with this is that she is trying to bring too many "characters" into the fold. The poem is often the most intimate and all-inclusive written medium. By bringing your writing close to you, it speaks to your own experience, but the good poem will also speak top the world at large. To do this, the writer needs to speak in more general terms, and with wider themes. (I.e. love, death, relationships with God, & ECT.) Voight is trying to reach in on these themes, but the experience of the pandemic was not hers, and it comes across as false with this knowledge.