Customer Reviews

Kyrie: Poems

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4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
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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.

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!

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.