Ellen Bryant Voigt (1943–2025)

This was an excellent book of poems by Ellen Bryant Voigt. The poems are mostly sonnets about the 1918-1919 influenza epidemic that killed 25 million people worldwide. You can't really call a book of poetry prescient or prophetic if the poet is writing about events from history but, wow, it is more than a bit disconcerting how much the poems in this book speak to what is occurring on a daily basis all over the world right now.

The cover blurbs called the poems haunting and that is certainly show more true. Voigt intertwines poems about WWI and families experiencing the pandemic at home which, when you think about it, both caused a huge loss of life and devastated families. How many families had sons killed in the war and then lost sons and daughters due to the influenza and how many soldiers came home to virus devastated families?

Having only read the the book jacket information, I quickly realized how haunting the poems would be after reading the prologue:

After the first year, weeds and scrub;
after five, juniper and birch,
alders filling in among the briars;
ten more years, maples rise and thicken;
forty years, the birches crowded out,
a new world swarms on the floor of the hardwood forest.
And who can tell us where there was an orchard,
where a swing, where the smokehouse stood?

Below is what I consider one of the more moving poems:

To be brought from the bright schoolyard into the house:
to stand by her bed like an animal stunned in the pen:
against the grid of the quilt, her hand seems
stitched to the cuff of its sleeve-although he wants
most urgently the hand to stroke his head,
although he thinks he could kneel down
that it would need to travel only inches
to brush like a breath his flushed cheek,
he doesn't stir: all his resolve,
all his resources go to watching her,
her mouth, her hair a pillow of blackened ferns-
he means to match her stillness bone for bone.
Nearby he hears the younger children cry,
and his aunts, like careless thieves, out in the kitchen.

It is hard to read about any pandemic right now but I found these poems highly affecting and it makes me wonder what poets both present and future are and will be writing about our present pandemic. Let's hope they are as emotionally poignant as the poems in Ellen Bryan Voigt's Kyrie. show less

4.0

I absolutely adore this little book of poems. It is best read from cover to cover, as Bryant Voigt weaves a story of loss, illness, sadness and sometimes, joy. We have used this little book in our hospital reading group and find that it tells the story of a plague far better than much longer ones. A very gifted poet, a book not to be missed, even (especially?) if you think you don't like poetry.

Dense but intense. Thorough and thoroughly a pain in my - erm, neck - because it's taking me a long time to get through it and make sure it sticks in my brain. Covers gender, life and writing, Modernists and the adjectives, and more.