[a grim panic]
a grim
panic
a
tune
on the open sea:
ou ow au
. . . all
the old
men
cutting each other to pieces
a gaping mouth
an
ear
in anguish
a
struck harp
[my desire]
my desire
I
haul
down to the bright sea
and
beauty
I
most violent
armor in shame
o
I spear
the endless miles
[that burly heart]
That burly heart
lived
where mother
sprung
wild with
timber
and
death
[father, brave son of]
father,
brave son of the
craggy
first
father,
by will of
blooming orchards
and pastures full of sheep—
you
wounded
us, we
ourselves
wounds on wounds
[hurled hurled]
hurled
hurled
hand and
chest—
not even
god
would be
stunned
Each erasure is made from one page of printed text from the following source:
Fagles, Robert, et al. The Iliad. Penguin, 1990.
[a grim panic]: Book 14, lines 13-42
[my desire]: Book 1, lines 133-62
[that burly heart]: Book 5, lines 534-67
[father, brave son of]: Book 14, lines 100-30
[hurled hurled]: Book 5, lines 14-44
Artist Statement: These visual erasures come from The Iliad, trans. Robert Fagles. It seems ever more important, at this time of the specter of global war, that we revisit, examine, and confront the horrors and tenderness of war. This is war on a global and personal scale, pared down from narrative, stripped of context. Of course I am indebted to the work Alice Oswald began with Memorial. I am also indebted to the work of Sarah J. Sloat, whose work in Hotel Almighty made the possibilities of the visual medium of erasure come alive for me.
Ellen Kombiyil (she/her) is the author of Histories of the Future Perfect (2015), and a micro chapbook avalanche tunnel (2016). Her forthcoming book, Love as Invasive Species, will be released by Cornerstone Books in 2024. Recent work has appeared or is forthcoming in New Ohio Review, Nimrod, North American Review, and Ploughshares. She is a 2022 recipient of a BRIO Award (Bronx Recognizes Its Own) from the Bronx Council on the Arts, a two-time winner of the Mary M. Fay Poetry Award from Hunter College, a recipient of an Academy of American Poets college prize, and was awarded the Nancy Dean Medieval Prize for an essay on the acoustic quality of Chaucer’s poetics. A graduate of the University of Chicago and Hunter’s MFA program, she currently teaches writing at Hunter College.