Date of Award

Fall 1987

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Arts (MA)

Department

English

Program/Concentration

English

Committee Director

Peggy Shumaker

Committee Member

Carole Oles

Call Number for Print

Special Collections; LD4331.E64R92

Abstract

A friend of mine once said to me "I cannot have a friend who has not suffered." I agree with her, for suffering constitutes, I believe, the benchmarks of initiation into personhood. The poems in Benchmarks describe one middle-aged woman's experience of initiation, her sometimes painful journey from innocence to experience.

There was no premeditation, no awareness ahead of time that any one theme would pervade these poems, but a theme does emerge when the poems are looked at as a group. This woman describes vignettes, real and imaginary, as she unfolds as a human being. She starts with her childhood in Alabama, her deep and often mysterious bonds with her parents, grandparents, aunts, and uncles; her fascination with the irrational and unseen, with spirits and gods. She moves on to her eventual and often unhappy marriage, her experience of the wrench of mother-love, her divorce, and the strange, new experience of dating again at mid-life. Woven throughout is her on-again, off-again fascination with death and other escapes from the here-and-now.

Finally there is a sense of triumph, a sense that she has become a person in her own right, unsupported and unencumbered.

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DOI

10.25777/hq0f-rs21

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