Kyrie: Poems
Couldn't load pickup availability
About this book
In this mosaic of sonnets Ellen Bryant Voigt takes on a monumental challenge: to conjure up the influenza pandemic of 1918-19 a harrowing but little-recorded event in history. Over twenty-five million lives were lost worldwide half a million in the United States alone. Focusing first on a family and then branching out Voigt includes the voices of a soldier writing home his schoolteacher fiancee orphaned children bereft husbands and wives. As seasons pass the separate voices accumulate into one vast almost Biblical story: the report of a community in the grip of mounting untreatable contagion. "How we survived: we locked the doors / and let nobody in." Kyrie is a tour de force of imagination grounded in history with overtones for our own time of plague.
