Poetry Informed by the Pandemic on To the Best of Our Knowledge

On Wisconsin Public Radio's To the Best of Our Knowledge, Charles Monroe-Kane speaks with Mexican-American writer Ilan Stavans, who recently edited a multi-genre literary anthology responding to the Covid-19 pandemic called And We Came Outside and Saw the Stars Again (Restless Books, 2020). One of the poems Stavans reads on-air is "Quarantine," by the late Eavan Boland, about the 1847 epidemic. Afterward, the two discuss the poem's relevance now: 

Quarantine

In the worst hour of the worst season

of the worst year of a whole people

a man set out from the workhouse with his wife, 

He was walking - they were both walking - north.

She was sick with famine fever and could not keep up.

He lifted her and put her on his back. 

He walked like that west and west and north.

Until at nightfall, under freezing stars they arrived.

In the morning, they were both found dead. 

Of cold. Of hunger. Of the toxins of a whole history.

But her feet were held against his breastbone.

The last heat of his flesh was his last gift to her.

Let no love poem ever come to this threshold.

There is no place here for the inexact

praise of the easy graces and sensuality of the body. 

There is only time for this merciless inventory: 

Their death together in the winter of 1847.

Also, what they suffered, how they lived.

And what there is between a man and woman. 

And in which darkness it can best be proved. 

IS: It's a beautiful point.

CMK: It is. You know what? It's kind of perfect. It's a perfect moment. And I read it to my wife and when I read it, because of the gender, I put myself in the role of the man carrying the woman. But knowing my relationship with my wife, honestly, I'm the woman, being carried. And, boy, that really hit home for how the pandemic was for me.

IS: The poem wants to simply show that in a pandemic, you sometimes have to escape. This happened 170 years ago. It was written in 2008. But it refers to 1847. And yet you feel as if that couple could be living right now, as somebody who is embracing their father or their mother or their sister or their daughter for the last time before they are sent to a hospital, or before they see them for the last time before they die.

Read more and listen to their complete conversation on To the Best of Our Knowledge.