Tristia

<p><span style=color: rgba(0 0 0 1)>In </span><em style=color: rgba(0 0 0 1)>Tristia</em><span style=color: rgba(0 0 0 1)> Carmen Bugan tests the lyric against loss once again as everything collapses around her but this time much closer to home. These are poems about forging a stronger self in the fires of her lifetime whether they are the forest fires that cover the American continent the war in Ukraine or her own world turned to ashes. The speaker in the poem 'Enheduana' laments: </span></p><p></p><p><span style=color: rgba(35 31 32 1)> He spat on my oven full of food </span></p><p><span style=color: rgba(35 31 32 1)> Walked over my baskets full of bread</span></p><p><span style=color: rgba(35 31 32 1)> Soiled the marriage bed left the children crying </span></p><p><span style=color: rgba(35 31 32 1)> And my heart toiling with heaven and earth.</span></p><p class=ql-align-justify></p><p><span style=color: rgba(0 0 0 1)>Her poems insist on the beauty of the natural world itself under threat as a source of strength as in 'Hawk' where the speaker prays:</span></p><p></p><p><span style=color: rgba(0 0 0 1)>       Hawk take everything </span></p><p><span style=color: rgba(0 0 0 1)>       That is weak in me </span></p><p><span style=color: rgba(0 0 0 1)>       In your claws: eat it. </span></p><p><span style=color: rgba(0 0 0 1)> Leave me wise and patient. </span></p>