Review: Kyrie by Ellen Bryant Voigt

reviewed by Sarah Carey

Kyrie
Ellen Bryant Voigt
W.W. Norton and Company, 1995
$17.95; 79 pp.
ISBN: 9780393037968

If past is prologue … the saying goes. If we knew then, what we know now…, we might say, the implication of the unsaid part of the sentence being that knowledge we’ve gained in our lifetime might, had we been able to access it earlier, have led us to make different choices — choices with a capital “C” — to live another life, presumably a better one, so wise have we now become.

Whatever choices we’ve made in our lives, we can’t go backwards in time. But as the United States alone approaches 400,000 projected coronavirus deaths at the end of 2020, I found myself reading Ellen Bryant Voigt’s Kyrie, her 1995 collection of sonnets that summon life during the 1918 flu pandemic. I was seeking, perhaps, a window into how others experienced an event of such life-changing proportions, and what might be learned from their stories.

Based on what I’d read about this book that drew me to it, I expected stories, but found more than the cacophony of human voices Voigt evokes in lyrical testimonies chronicling her subjects’ days and nights—their labors, rituals and thought processes. In Kyrie, Voigt offers a richly layered re-creation of history, reimagining lives that despite being a century removed from present-day technology and medicine, were not that different than our own in their powerlessness over disease and death.

Voigt prefaces Kyrie with a quote from Alfred Crosby from America’s Forgotten Pandemic: The Influenza of 1918:

……..Nothing else—no infection, no war, no famine—has ever killed so many in as short a
……..period.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the global flu of 1918 infected about 500 million people, or about one-third of the world’s population, with the number of deaths estimated to be at least 50 million worldwide.  About 675,000 deaths occurred in the United States alone. In a Sept. 6 article focusing on Americans’ renewed interest in family histories that overlapped the 1918 flu, New York Times writer Hannah Natanson notes that even President Woodrow Wilson was infected, just as he was trying to negotiate an end to World War I.

Voigt allows us to experience that pandemic through the voices of characters we could know as neighbors, relatives, friends and lovers, as well as those we call on to help us navigate life and death on a day-to-day basis. Their world is set against the backdrop of the Great War, with its specific sacrifices and sorrows; the added layer of that separate set of horrors creates a depth of field that allows Voigt’s characters to stand out even more starkly in their individuality. One such character is Price, a soldier whose letters home to his fiancée, Mattie, weave through Voigt’s sonnets and provide a kind of narrative anchor, but also a poignant conveyance of blind hope. Price’s letters are his bulwark against adversity, while also witnessing to how those in the literal trenches clung to personal nostalgia—for home, for innocence, for love—as lifelines. In one such letter/poem, untitled, as all are in this book, he writes:

……..Dear Mattie, Though you don’t tell of troubles there
……..meaning to buy me peace I would suppose,
……..dreadful word goes around, families perished
……..or scattered. I remind myself Pug’s mother
……..died from having him and he thought orphans
……..saved themselves some time in the scheme of things—
……..won’t a future happiness be ransomed
……..by present woe? Dear Mattie, it’s you
……..I think of when I say my prayers, your face,
……..it’s you I’ll want when I get back from this…

And in another:

……..Dear Mattie, Did you have the garden turned?
……..This morning early while I took my watch
……..I heard a wood sparrow—the song’s the same
……..no matter what they call them over here—
……..remembered too when we were marching in,
……..the cottonwoods and sycamores and popples,
……..how fine they struck me coming from the ship
……..after so much empty flat gray sky…

Nature as both stabilizer and cleansing agent in our characters’ lives, and in history in general, hits us front and center in Voigt’s prologue to the book. No matter what you see here, above you or below your feet, she seems to say, count on it changing; count on nature bringing a dead world back, in ways over which you have no control:

……..After the first year, weeds and scrub;
……..after five, juniper and birch,
……..alders filling in among the briars,
……..ten more years, maples rise and thicken;
……..forty years, the birches crowded out,
……..a new world swarms on the floor of the hardwood forest.
……..And who can tell us where there was an orchard,
……..where a swing, where the smokehouse stood?

Who can tell us what the past looks like? In the coming pages, Voigt’s characters proceed to offer us a record of their time and their environment, and if we listen carefully, we can hear echoes of present-day fears, angst and despair. These states of mind the poet captures feel all too real when seen through the lens of our current pandemic; we can easily conjure the desperation of overwhelmed  health care workers and the guilt of those who survive among infected families while others perish.

There’s the country doctor who goes house to house, seeing “deep in the lungs, every cloudiness not clearing” and on the day his trusted black bag he carries “like a Bible” is empty, breaks open a jug of liquor he finds “beneath the bed where a whole fevered family lay head to foot in their own and others’ filth.” A sister with survival guilt after is spared death while her more popular, more talented sibling is not. Entire communities succumb:

……..The barber, the teacher, the plumber, the preacher,
……..the man in a bowler, man in a cap,
……..the banker, the baker, the cabinet-maker,
……..the fireman, postman, clerk in the shop,

……..soldier and sailor, teamster and tailor,
……..man shoveling snow or sweeping his step,
……..carpenter, cobbler, liar, lawyer,
……..laid them down and never got up…

In addition to human testimonies, animals are woven into the fabric of Voigt’s subjects’ lives, both as touchstones in family life and harbingers of hardship. Who among us who has had a dog can deny the ways our animals see and sense objects before we do, not to mention danger and threat? My Labrador once found a remote garage door opener in a front porch pot before we even knew a handyman had left it there, and more than once has gone off at a baby stroller just a little bigger than he’s used to seeing. Voigt’s first poem after her prologue hints at non-human clues to dis-ease in their environment:

……..All ears, nose, tongue and gut,
……..dogs know if something’s wrong…

……..Dogs, all kinds of dogs—signals
……..are their job, they cock their heads,
……..their backs bristle, even house dogs
……..wake up and circle the wool rug.
……..Outside, the vacant yard: then,
……..within minutes something eats the sun.

In the poem just prior to the epilogue, Voigt forces us to confront the fact that in examining the circumstances surrounding the flu pandemic and the people who lived through it, we are not viewing specimens in an exhibit. Like us, these individuals look back on their losses, changed landscapes and choices, and come to a reckoning they owe no one. It’s as if her collective community stares right back at us trying to translate their experiences into our own, daring us to make them speak:

……..Why did you have to go back, go back
……..to that awful time, upstream, scavenging
……..the human wreckage, what happened or what we did
……..or failed to do? Why drag us back to the ditch?
……..Have you no regard for oblivion?

When she wrote Kyrie, Voigt could have had no idea that 25 years after the book’s publication, the world would find itself amidst another pandemic of global proportions, with no end in sight. But haven’t we always looked back in time at our ancestors, to God, however defined, and up at the sky for the faces of those we have lost, and what they might still tell us? We are watching them, but they are also watching us, like the stars in the first four lines of W. S. Merwin’s poem, “Rain Light”:

……..All day the stars watch from long ago
……..my mother said I am going now
……..when you are alone you will be all right
……..whether or not you know you will know

To enter the lives of the people who experienced the 1918 pandemic through the personas Voigt creates in Kyrie is to glimpse the power of collective loss and all its reverberating impacts. I found in these poems an opportunity to reflect on our current historical predicament through a different lens. Like Voigt’s subjects, we are all subject to the power of nature, no matter what we did or didn’t do, and no matter what choices we made or didn’t make at any juncture in our life journey.

Sarah Carey is a graduate of the Florida State University creative writing program. Her poems and book reviews have appeared recently or are forthcoming in Tinderbox, EcoTheo, Atlanta Review, Grist, Yemassee, Valparaiso Review, Barrow Street, Potomac Review, Glass Poetry Journal, Frontier Poetry, and elsewhere. She was the recipient of an International Merit Award in the Atlanta Review‘s 2018 and 2019 International Poetry Prize competitions and was nominated for the 2020 Orison Anthology by both SWWIM Every Day and Split Rock Review for work published in those journals. She also received Pushcart Prize nominations from Split Rock Review and Concrete Wolf Press for work published in 2019.