Kyrie

the long version

In this 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 fiancee, 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.