In truth, Ellen Bryant Voigt’s Kyrie was disappointing.
The premise—a series of poems based around the 1918 outbreak of influenza—was so interesting to me that I was sure the substance had to match up. What I found was unfortunately dry. While Voigt’s poems are beautiful and skillfully crafted, the voice never quite got through to me. There is a certain detachment that I feel could fit as well in a work like this as a stronger sense of emotional connection (because there was certainly emotion in her poems, it just wasn’t explicit through tone alone), but at the same time, the speaker’s voice feels largely too neutral to convey anything significant one way or the other.
Even so, the poem on page 33 stuck out to me. Perhaps it’s because I have a personal relationship with school and teachers, but, again—though I didn’t feel the voice did much to characterize the speaker and instead feels like a complete third party from the characters interacting in the poem, the poem itself was an interesting and outstanding read for me. The last two lines in particular (“I just couldn't touch her, I let her cry. / Their teacher, and I let them cry.”) I haven’t been able to stop thinking about since I read them.
The speaker talks about how she interacts with these kids and their germs on a daily basis, and even calls them cherubim—she is not demonizing their sickness, because that’s just how children are; they are wet and they are messy and she can’t use that against them. Even so, when the mood switches to the present instead of just habitual messiness and the speaker claims that she couldn’t do anything when “the youngest started to cry, flushed and scared,” it shows a visceral shift in the way such normal interactions have been called into question by the flu.
In this way, I suppose the speaker’s voice was effective, and if possible, I would like to incorporate that kind of subtle shift (the poetic essence of showing and not telling) into my own writing.
I can definitely see how you find Kyrie disappointing, Rachel. In my response to Tori, I mentioned how Voigt could have used the structure of her poem to let more of the charged emotion so blatantly present in the subject of her work come through to the reader, because I felt that somehow the way she structured her poems felt too in control, a bit detached. You're right, her tone is a bit dry, and we don't really feel what's going on as much as we see it. And even then, we don't "see" as much as poetry usually let's us see, permeating its subject. I think a way to remedy this would have been to use more figurative language. Voigt does skillfully use poetic language here, but I think that more imagery should have been used, and I mean that in the metaphorical kind of way. Onomatopoeia would have been quite effective here too, I feel. Though the line you liked on page 34 was indeed quite moving, the text surrounding it (or leading up to it) could have built up to that point by using more figurative language.
ReplyDeleteI can understand why Kyrie could be looked at as “disappointing” because all we knew going into it what the subject matter was, which in concept is incredibly interesting. While personally I enjoyed the book I could see how Rachel could see it as dry. There were times where the language was very matter of fact. It was interesting readying this so close to Rookery and Nox because they are so incredibly different. There was a little bit of a lack of personal connection. Perhaps in comparison to something like Rookery it was dry however to me the author did a great job of livening up an epidemic that is often analyzed in a very academic light. I l also liked the poem on page 33 however I felt that same connection throughout the book. I enjoyed the character development and the portrayal of a group of people dealing with the same tragedy and loss.
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