Kyrie by Ellen Bryant Voigt

Kyrie by Ellen Bryant Voigt  

From the book jacket: “In this astonishing 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 fiancée, 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.” 

kyrie – a short repeated invocation (in Greek or in translation) used in many Christian liturgies, especially at the beginning of the Eucharist or as a response in a litany. 

Kyrie is a collection of 58 untitled sonnets without any discernible rhyme scheme, but that rarely stray from perfect iambic pentameter. The poems in this piece are untitled, each its own sort of repeated invocation, a response to the litany of dead—an estimated twenty-five million worldwide, many of whom were never named, still more who were marked down as having died from other ailments, not taking into account how influenza contributed to the worsening of their conditions. 

  

To call Kyrie a “collection” is perhaps not wholly correct, as the poems in this piece are a coherent narrative from the voices of a community ravaged by disease.  

The tone throughout is sardonic, melancholy, wistful, and not a little Gothic, beautifully incorporating the common themes of gothic literature—a miasma over the land, the uncanny, and the grotesque of body—into the contents of the poems.