"Quarantine" Parts 1-9
from Brian Henry's
Quarantine

Brian Henry:

Brian Henry is the author of four books of poetry and an editor of Verse. He lives in Richmond, Virginia.

About Quarantine:

Winner of the Alice Fay di Castagnola Award for a manuscript in progress from the Poetry Society of America

"In 40 verse sections and several brief prose interludes, Henry (Graft) portrays a nameless Englishman dying of plague in 1665. His protagonist remembers key bits of his life (in reverse order, from most recent to longest ago) as he lies in a field beside the dead bodies of his wife and son; he may have brought the disease home from a nearby river where he met young men for anonymous sex. Henry's doomed husband recalls his life in rapt, halting lines without punctuation, indebted to W. S. Merwin: his wife 'did not scream like my son/ she died just the same hot and in pain/ I will die silent I will tell my story as I die.' Though horrid vistas recur throughout – 'the bodies on fire in the river for days' – the greatest pain is inward, as he regrets a life unlived: 'If I could burrow into the dirt/ beneath my back I would fracture/ the earth to return.' Henry, an editor of Verse magazine, takes his speaker's voice to a gritty extreme."
— Publishers Weekly

"In this ghostly, dead man's series, a stark world of violence and disease arises like a reworking of The Seventh Seal. Quarantine's language is robed in history's strange temporality, running back and forth, hitting the present again and again. Yet, curiously, it is a book without time or place – the river is any river, the plague is any plague, and the time clearly could be now."
— Eleni Sikelianos

Search Poetry Daily / Amazon.com for other books: