Word: poem
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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After that I sort of just wrote every night. I kept notebooks and I'd write a poem every night and draw a picture at the end from when I was nine. For years and years and years. And it was lot of bad poetry when I was a teenager, of course. Thank God my mother threw it all away she's very neat person. When I left Ireland I was 17--I led a sort of wild existence--I traveled to all these different places. I always say I've cleaned bathrooms in every European capital in the world...
...their compulsions even as they execute them, and, like Keelin as she lives out Aisling's life after her, are doomed to act out roles they have no control over. Martin's characters are fully and enticingly written, emerging from the text like the heroes of an epic poem. Culminating in Aisling herself, who even in childhood seems to be a giantess, the figures spring hyper-real from this surreal journey narrative...
...impossible: merely the forgotten truth. Poet Joan Murray, in her epic poem Queen of the Mist, details the sad life and short fame of Annie Taylor, an elderly and utterly destitute school teacher living at the turn of the century who devised and executed what seemed the perfect plan for money and fame. After building with her thin hands a barrel to enclose her body like a womb and shelter her from her fall over the raging ledge of water, Annie Taylor subsequently became the first person in history to propel herself down the length of Niagara Falls...
Throughout the poem, Murray sympathetically and sometimes even bitterly reconstructs what she considers are the primary reasons Annie hasn't found the place in history that she deserves, ultimately blaming Annie's age and gender for her rejection from collective memory. Old women simply don't beautiful symbols make, and memory, according to Murray, often prescribes to strict aesthetic parameters...
Although often over-dramatic and one-sided, the poem as a whole attempts to reconstruct without decoration or artifice the story of a bypassed heroine. Delicate Homeric fingers of rosy dawn definitely don't reach up to sooth the reader's discerning aesthetic; instead, Murray evocatively and sympathetically describes a woman's life that was far from beautiful. Rejecting the traditional epic techniques of plot momentum and beautiful characters, Murray creates an entirely new form of epic poetry by focusing instead upon the hopelessness of an aging woman's attempts to revitalize her downward spiraling life...