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The Tethers

The Tethers investigates the capacity of the modern lyric poem to hold successfully multiple, potentially conflicting elements in tension, in particular the multiple registers that people encounter on a daily basis. Many poems bring together contemporary and older, potentially archaic language and rhetorical structures. In the poem, “Hardscrabble,” the bitterness of the cold weather combined with the mundanity of an administrative meeting culminate in what may seem an archaic imperative--“Come away, come away!”, while in “Over the Thames” an awareness of the fragility of people’s psychological survival leads to the dated invocation “O”. In both these works, the emotional pitch connects with an older language to imply a more primal sense of humanity by combining examples of contemporary and archaic language and rhetoric.