Quarantine

Brian Henry

“In 40 verse sections and several brief prose interludes, Henry (Graft) portrays a nameless Englishman dying of plague in 1665. His protagonist remembers key bits of his life (in reverse order, from most recent to longest ago) as he lies in a field beside the dead bodies of his wife and son; he may have brought the disease home from a nearby river where he met young men for anonymous sex. Henry's doomed husband recalls his life in rapt, halting lines without punctuation, indebted to W.S. Merwin: his wife ‘did not scream like my son / she died just the same hot and in pain / I will die silent I will tell my story as I die.’ Though horrid vistas recur throughout—‘the bodies on fire in the river for days’—the greatest pain is inward, as he regrets a life unlived: ‘If I could burrow into the dirt / beneath my back I would fracture / the earth in return.’ Henry, an editor of Verse magazine, takes his speaker's voice to a gritty extreme.” —Publishers Weekly