To guide you through the land of darkness and silence."
- Helen Keller, from The World I Live In
The Myth of Water is a cycle of thirty-four poems by award-winning Alabama poet and writer Jeanie Thompson in the voice of world-renowned Alabamian Helen Keller. In their sweep, the poems trace Keller’s metamorphosis from a native of a bucolic Alabama town to her emergence as a beloved, international figure who championed the rights of the deaf-blind worldwide.
Thompson’s artfully concatenated vignettes form a mosaic that maps the insightful mind behind the elegant and enigmatic persona Keller projected. Thompson takes readers on the journey of Keller’s life, from some of the thirty-seven countries she visited, including the British Isles, Europe, and Japan to the wellsprings of her emotional awakening and insight. The poems are paired with fascinating biographical anecdotes from Keller’s life and samplings from her writing, which infuse the work with richly-rewarding biographical detail.
Read more here.
"These aren’t poems that clamor to the other senses, such as touch and smell, to fill the void of sight and sound (though they do effectively engage those other senses). Rather, they find in thought, language, and human connection a nearly material experience."
—NewPages.com
Today, poets are exploring how to engage readers with history by entering the lives of characters. This increasingly a well-regarded genre is called historical persona poetry. When former Kentucky Poet Laureate Frank X. Walker visited Montgomery, Alabama, he met with students in George W. Carver High School’s library. “There ought to be a section in every library,” Walker said, “labeled historical persona poetry.” Like Shakespeare's soliloquies and Robert Browning's dramatic monologues, historical persona poems reveal character, motivation, and the human soul through intimate speech – sometimes addressed to an auditor and sometimes in a moment of self-reflection.
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My exploration of Alabama-born Helen Keller has taught me the power of developing an intimate relationship with a figure from history. I read biographies and other accounts of her life, but her own writing -- her journal of the six months immediately following Anne Sullivan Macy's death and the letters she sent back to the USA after visiting the devastation in Japan following the atomic bombs -- led me to know her heart and to imagine the woman she was. I hope these poems give a sketch of who Helen Keller became, and open a window into the heart she gave to the world. Love, compassion for others, and the search for justice motivated her above all else.