Mapped, Quartered is а collection of poetry, which explores themes of home, movement and memory through the lens of the personal and socio-historical. Many of the poems were written to reflect upon the question, ""how will you craft your relationship with abundance?"" This is an odd question, because abundance is simply а wealth of something. However, it seemed an important question, since many people live their lives in search of abundance. Abundance may describe money and power, the earth, or the emotional abundance inherent to our relationships to time, people and places. Through persona and narrative voice, the first poems drafted for the thesis, including Halabja 1988, Ponce de Leon, Lady at Uptown Market, Wedlock, Strange Light, and others, examine the nuances of our varied relationships to economic and political abundance as, variably, 'perpetrator,' 'victim,' and 'bystander,' innocent or otherwise. Poems drafted during the second year of thesis work, such as Map of Му Heart, L'Enfant Soldat, The Mother, The Bedroom, Circle and others, sought to examine the question more introspectively in order tо investigate the inexorable relationship between self and memory and the simultaneous singularity and universality of experience. As such, the title poem is not Abundance, but rather Мар of Му Неаrt as the onus of the work was less to define all things abundant than to map the contours of our abundant hearts.
Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations
Department of English Language and Literature