Elizabeth T. Gray, Jr. (Poetry ’09) on “The Obstacle”

2009 poetry graduate Elizabeth T. Gray, Jr., recently wrote for the Paris Review and discussed one of her poems for the Poetry Society of America. Read an excerpt of her reflection on “The Obstacle” below:

ON “THE OBSTACLE”

The obstacle described here is barbed wire, rows of carefully entangled and interconnected snarls of barbed wire built in front of British front-line trenches in Sanctuary Wood near Ypres in Belgian Flanders in June 1916. Rows of wire designed to protect British and Canadian soldiers from waves of German infantry. Rows of wire which are no longer there. Had you been riding by with the family on a bicycle on that summer day in 2016 you could not have seen the beginning of the trench system, with its saps and parapets and traverses, nor the expanse of barbed wire, thirty feet across, lying in wait in shallow hollows in front of the firing trench at the edge of the wood.

Read the reflection in its entirety here: https://poetrysociety.org/features/in-their-own-words/elizabeth-t-gray-jr-on-the-obstacle