Magister Artium - MA / Nobathembu lifts her hand and waves at her neighbour. She is watering spinach in her garden with a jug from a bucket. At age sixty-nine, her beauty shines. The sun is high on the echoes of Nyanga village – echoes of barking, the neighing of nearby donkeys, a truck against a slope. Two butterflies mate in her thorn tree. In their hearts the story begins. Their wings brighten and in their own time they disappear, following their peculiar rhythms.

<p> <i>Moving Pictures</i> is a body of poems accessing a place-based aesthetic through an ecstatic tone. A concrete image offers a resonant field of memory and imagined properties (as in Rilke&rsquo;s &ldquo;The Panther&rdquo; and Proust&rsquo;s &ldquo;magic lantern&rdquo; in <i>Swann&rsquo;s Way </i>), the tangible qualities of a house are given associative values, contingent qualities. This &ldquo;presence of place&rdquo; composes a place&rsquo;s physical properties and the impressions derived from the surrounding history, culture and mythos accrued. A &ldquo;tapestry&rdquo; that a speaker in narrative lyric performs in a poem seeks to realize as purposeful, felt design, positive or negative providence, a desire to locate the comfort in the predictable, assurance that there is a controlling will and determining voice in living physical experiences. That tapestry and the absence of it either is protective or revealing as a person might see an arrangement of planets at birth as a prophetic determinant of identity and causality, a method to determine identity and consolidate experience. A bright tension is often felt traveling to a distant country or returning home after a long time away. Thus, many of these poems deal with distance and light as allegory, the harshness of exposure, the hope for concealment. Darkness and absence suggest longing for concealment but also a capacity to accentuate light and presence. There is ultimately, the incommensurability between art and thought and act. Like trying to translate the Greek word logos as word. In poetry, the performance is persona, a character applying language as an imperfect lathe to shape knowledge and understanding. That knowledge is limited and poetry is a type of investigative tool. In this way, attention to syntax, lineation, and spatial construction are the needle and thread to stitch the narrative &ldquo;I&rdquo;.</p><p>

Please note: creative writing theses are permanently embargoed in OpenBU. No public access is forecasted for these. To request private access, please click on the lock icon and filled out the appropriate web form. / A collection of 35 original poems written by Kathleen Radigan during the school-year of September 2017-May 2018. / 2031-01-01T00:00:00Z

Please note: creative writing theses are permanently embargoed in OpenBU. No public access is forecasted for these. To request private access, please click on the lock icon and filled out the appropriate web form. / Creative writing / 2031-01-01T00:00:00Z

Please note: creative writing theses are permanently embargoed in OpenBU. No public access is forecasted for these. To request private access, please click on the lock icon and filled out the appropriate web form. / Collection of poems / 2031-01-01T00:00:00Z

Please note: creative writing theses are permanently embargoed in OpenBU. No public access is forecasted for these. To request private access, please click on the lock icon and filled out the appropriate web form. / Collection of poems / 2031-01-01T00:00:00Z

Please note: creative writing theses are permanently embargoed in OpenBU. No public access is forecasted for these. To request private access, please click on the lock icon and filled out the appropriate web form. / A collection of short stories / 2031-01-01T00:00:00Z

Please note: creative writing theses are permanently embargoed in OpenBU. No public access is forecasted for these. To request private access, please click on the lock icon and filled out the appropriate web form. / Creative writing / 2031-01-01T00:00:00Z

Thesis (M.A.)--Boston University

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