Voice Message

by Katherine Barrett Swett

Through the poems of Voice Message, Katherine Barrett Swett reflects on her personal tragedy and the fragility of human lives and bodies with a tender care. Her debut collection explores the powers of art and poetry to participate in the processing of catastrophic grief, speaking through both the consolation and devastation these creative works can offer. Swett’s formal verse provides a lens through which sadness, destruction, and loss appear as aberrant and inevitable. In tragic lyric, the poet searches poetry, art, mythology, and her own memory for the fleeting image of her lost daughter “in music, painting, or a carved stone name.” Frequently looking to visual arts for inspiration, she finds that Vermeer’s paintings of distant rooms guide and contextualize pain, offering motivation, comfort, and release. Through villanelles, sonnets, quatrains, and free verse, Swett invokes the voices, narratives, and images, both personal and cultural, that haunt her speakers. Suspended in the aftermath of the unexpected and unspeakable death of her college-age daughter, the poet’s language is held together in a somber and necessary restraint. But this restraint does not signal the peace of closure. Rather, these poems quietly and steadily remind readers it is still “the open wound / not the scar,” that “all we have are words and flesh,” and that we are forever vulnerable. The rhythm of and echoes of sonnets and songs lead us to the sticky intersections of tragedy, recovery, and strange forms of beauty.

Genres: Poetry

72 pages, Paperback

First published March 15, 2020

Reviews

[Patricia · Rating 5 out of 5]

This collection of poems, beautifully constructed, artfully conceived, is full of sonnets whose iambic pentameter lopes across each line as easily as Shakespeare's did in the late 16th and early 17th century. But these poems are of our time now, in the early 21st.

Subjects like global warming, the gentle art of tidying up, mix with ekphrastic poems inspired by Vermeer's painting and Tu Fu's poems. Sonnets are Swett's specialty, but she also is a master of the villanelle, and one of the most moving ones is dedicated to her daughter who has died.

The poet does not shy from describing the menopausal woman still hungry for a bit of carefree sex; an emotionally powerful poem describes Edgar Allan Poe's cottage in 1992 when drug addicts littered the streets around his neighborhood.

Swett's brilliance comes from her ability to treat difficult subjects while breathing new life into old forms.