Pandemic Poems

COVID-19 spread like wildfire around the globe in 2020. Country after country experienced massive shutdowns, introduced measures like masks, social distancing, and quarantines, and found hospitals and health services stretched to the limit as infection rates and deaths soared. In these poems, written for the large part during the first wave of the pandemic, Philip Resnick offers his own take on what was to become a world turned upside down. He writes of the fear which the virus engendered, the angst and shattered illusions many experienced, the overtones of Apocalypse and end of time that hung over the unfolding events. He looks to historical and political analogies or precedents; taps literary sources as disparate as the Greek tragedians, Dante, Matthew Arnold, Anna Akhmatova, Garcia Lorca or Borges in writing about our situation; and wrestles with his personal reactions to an event without precedent in his lifetime. The result is a body of work that bears vivid witness to what so many of us have experienced this past year. For what the author presents through these poems are reflections on a pivotal event that none of us living through it are likely to forget.