Short Takes on Long Poems

At Length magazine’s newest feature continues today with Marianne Boruch on Ellen Bryan Voigt:

Maybe a truly fine collection of poems means this in the end: you don’t need the book in hand to be moved, solaced, troubled, haunted by it. You might not even need words anymore.

Case in point: In Scotland as I write this, I stupidly forgot to bring my copy of Ellen Bryant Voigt’s Kyrie to think through again, to write of as promised, however brief.  So at first, I could only remember that long poem, a sequence of linked sonnets and semi-sonnets that concern the flu epidemic of 1918.  Which is to say that minus the book itself, I could only close my eyes on this city of Edinburgh and see into those little square windows of Voigt’s sequence, into that stricken time...[Keep Reading]…