There are sixteen poems in the chapbook. Some seem to tell a story of lovers separated by social conditions beyond their control, or even by the force of their love itself, which approaches idolatry. Some seem to tell a story of a soul in combat with doubt, with faith, with ideas of God, with its own powers and gifts, or with ideas of absolute power. Some seem to counterpoint thematic elements in debates that admit no resolution: what is enough, what is too much, what is victory, what is defeat, how much is gigantic ambition or gigantic love entitled to, how do people go on living if the promise of Heaven, of justice, or of meaning is a lie or a sham? How does a self or a nation divided within itself leave off destroying itself; how does an internal conflict reach resolution? How can defeat be redefined as victory, or lacking and losing as having, and can this be done through the power of language and of will? Most of the poems contain some or all of these elements, and so comprise, if not a narrative, then a symphonic or operatic meditation.

So, the divided selves in the chapbook may be, in different poems, or sometimes all at once, the narrator and a lover with whom she cannot be united, the narrator and a God whose justice she cannot trust, the narrator and her self or her sense of her own poetic power or muse, the two halves of a divided self, the two halves of a divided and warring nation, the free and the enslaved within that nation. The issues that divide the self, the lovers, the nation, have to do with power, justice, real versus sham, enough versus not enough or too much, separation versus unity, victory versus defeat, having versus losing. The poems circle around, dramatizing, restating, or re-imagining these issues, which by being intermingled become aspects of one conflict.

Often the link from one poem to the next is a word being used as a bridge, as when a series of poems will reconfigure a term like "door" or "sea." Sometimes the link is narrative or argumentative, as when the hope with which the narrator imagined reading a letter that failed to bring the "Heaven" it has seemed to promise is, in the next poem, reconfigured as "the child's faith" in heaven, which experience destroys, or when in one poem the narrator imagines being a bride, and then later realizes that "I cannot live with you." Sometimes the link is metaphysical, as when a series of poems takes up questions of power, empire, monarchy, abdication of power. When poems are so multiply and subtly linked, as they are, they begin, when read as a group, to echo and multiply each other's movement rather than moving linearly from one point to the next.

Go to "themes."