Off-campus UNL users: To download campus access dissertations, please use the following link to log into our proxy server with your NU ID and password. When you are done browsing please remember to return to this page and log out.
Non-UNL users: Please talk to your librarian about requesting this dissertation through interlibrary loan.
Sound Still Singing
Abstract
This collection of poetry is divided into three sections. Section I, arranged in loose chronological order, focuses on family/relationships; some are based on actual experiences, others fictionalized in part or whole. The poems in Section II, arranged in a similar order, were generated by two visits to Ireland: one a brief ten-day trip; the other, a six-month sabbatical in a small cottage in an isolated farming community on the northwest coast of County Mayo. Section III contains a set of poems about Turkey where I lived for several years; another about sunflowers/artists; and a mix about people, religious beliefs, gardens, seasons, and other subjects. I've allowed dialect and narrative to guide me throughout this collection. Both narrative and lyrical, most of the poems are cast in free verse. Fixed forms and variations appear: “The Snack” (a villanelle), “How to Write Ghazals,” ”A Sestina for Joe,” “A French Triolet for an Irish Cow,” “First Post” and “Village Wisdom” (quatrains), and sonnets, “Amy,” “Meagre: a Sonnet,” “A Pub for the Birds,” “View from a Mayo Window,” and “Brambles.” Shaped poems include: “Night” and “Divine Presence” (prose poems), as well as concrete poems “Immolation,” “Mockingbird,” and the opening stanza of “Wisteria.” Sound links appear in many poems traditional and less formal. Enjambment works forward and backward in several poems. Gerard Manley Hopkins' sprung rhythm; Walt Whitman's catalogues; Virginia Woolf's ability to look at experience with inverted vision; courses taken in poetry writing; my own teaching (creative writing, various literature courses); and finally, a lifetime of reading, starting with poetry written for children and ongoing, ranging from past to contemporary poets, Beowulf to Seamus Heaney have all influenced my work.
Subject Area
American literature|Modern literature|Creative writing|Literature
Recommended Citation
Paul, Marian O'Brien, "Sound Still Singing" (2003). ETD collection for University of Nebraska-Lincoln. AAI3116600.
https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/dissertations/AAI3116600