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Cibulé

Rosemary Zumpfe, University of Nebraska - Lincoln

Abstract

Cibulé, a poetry collection by Rosemary Zumpfe, expresses personal experience through a metaphysical perspective. The onion is used as an analogy for an exploratory process of removing layers to reach a core, and its structure of concentric circles is a symbol for infinity. Cibulé is a Czech word for onion. Zumpfe was raised in a bi-lingual household where the Czechoslovakian language and English were freely intermixed. Her poems include Czech words in an expression of that linguistic and cultural influence and a notation of the loss of that language; they contemplate how language functions and evolves in a context of connections and silences. Central to the collection is a maternal heritage that is remythologized by incorporating nature as metaphor and as a spiritual source. While the poems speak through female experience, they seek to degenderize culturally gendered paradigms of the sacred. The collection incorporates Zumpfe's interest in ecofeminism, science and quantum physics, synesthesia and the embodied experience. Her background in art, printmaking, and graphic design is basic to her process of writing and transferring that writing onto the page as a visual and physical object as well as a linguistic expression. Her poetry joins the creative discussion and feminist literary concerns with language, relationships, loss and the presentation of one's personal experience as being representative of aspects of the broader human condition.

Subject Area

Modern literature|American literature|Creative writing

Recommended Citation

Zumpfe, Rosemary, "Cibulé" (2013). ETD collection for University of Nebraska-Lincoln. AAI3558637.
https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/dissertations/AAI3558637

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