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Kyrie: Poems
I picked up Kyrie at the suggestion of an author friend who told me it was simply stunning and I had to read it—but when I began I had NO IDEA this collection of blank verse sonnets was about the 1918 influenza pandemic. The dedication, drawn from Alfred Crosby's book America's Forgotten Pandemic: The Influenza of 1918, reads, "Nothing else—no infection, no war, no famine—has ever killed so many in as short a period."
I'm glad I read this, but emotionally, it was a tough go, with lines like, "The weeks of fewer cases were a tease" and "How we survived: we locked the doors and let nobody in." Published in 1995, this is already a modern classic, and I expect readers will be returning to this collection for decades to come.
About the Book
From the publisher: “In this mosaic of sonnets, her fifth collection, Ellen Bryant Voigt takes on a monumental challenge: to conjure up the influenza pandemic of 1918-19, a little-recorded event that killed 25 million worldwide, half a million in America alone.”
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