The woman, a school-teacher, is seeking ways to make sense of the things that are happening to her community, especially in the beginning of the collection. The first poem hints at the tragedy to come, but the foretelling is delivered by dogs acting strangely. The narrator is looking for patterns, discerning time lines in the growth of boys, reasoning out why some lived and some fell ill. She shortly realizes that there is no use, that no explanation really exists, that it's God's will and there is nothing the community can do to protect themselves.
The form Voigt uses further this idea. Every poem is a sonnet, save the prologue, which lends an underlying structure and comprehensiveness to the collection, but there is no rhyme or metric structure. At first glance, the poems are free-verse, chaos, impulse, and chance ruling the poetry. But the constraints that Voigt places on the poetry, the narrative structure and the sonnet form, allow her to explore and manipulate this chaos more effectively. She, as a writer, and her character's, as the narrators, aren't pulled under the chaos, swept up in it,because they gather patterns and meanings around them. Voigt holds onto the patterns much longer than her characters, starts to slip confusion into form but pulls it back, until the last poem. This poem breaks the narrative structure, having the narrator address both Voigt herself and the reader. The final installment throws the reader into a final disarray.
I've been working on using constraints in my writing, especially in poems. Thinking about the page as a floodplain, when I start to pour water out it kind of just goes all over. When I build a canal, though, I can divert the stream to the crop I want to cultivate. I'm also really bad at this, so perhaps starting with formal constraints like Voigt does will help me deal with chaotic subjects.
Indeed, Voigt's lack of exact structure or meter in Kyrie could in fact be a reflection of the chaotic, tumultuous content of her work. At times she'll even seem to arbitrarily have stanzas of different lengths in the same poem. As you said, she and her audience are not "swept up in" this chaos, but I actually wish we were. War and epidemic disease are subjects that are difficult to successfully convey in art because of the magnitude of emotion that surges beneath said subjects, and because our connotations of war and disease are often so muddled and distorted by our own personal involvement that it's hard to communicate about either objectively without coming at it from many different angles. Though I do find that Voigt's Kyrie is a commendable piece, I feel that even her own ability to "manipulate this chaos" removes us from the severity and somberness of the material she is trying to cover. I know I would be very impressed if she had let her own work get a little out of hand, if only to underline the helplessness of her characters.
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