Book Review: vViIrRuUsS

Title: vViIrRuUsS 

Author: Jazalyn

Date: 2020

Publisher: Jazalyn

Quote: "A virus invades the life of all humanity..."

Among the quirkier books inspired by COVID-19 is this poetic look at the idea of a virus, in the literal sense of COVID and in the metaphoric senses of love, hate, and climate change, all in the form of free verse. 

I gave it four stars on the sites that use star rating systems. This may surprise some readers. Please allow me to explain. When I took a college course in Literary Criticism, we read several different theories of what literature does and how it should be judged. The one that stuck with me was that poetry needs to be judged in terms of what it seems to be trying to do. One category of poetry was "expressive," meaning poems that try to express someone's emotions. That is what Virus seems to be trying to do, and at that it certainly succeeds. That my own personal favorite poems tend to be primarily "mimetic," trying to communicate a perception of something that may arouse emotions--typically of admiration--but is primarily concerned with showing us something out in the real world, is irrelevant to the poems' success in expressing mood after mood after mood. I preferred The Colossus to Ariel; I'm sure Jazalyn preferred Ariel.

The moods might all be those of young single women, or of a young single woman; they're never identified with any other kind of person. All of these women appear to be introverts. Sometimes they claim to have been hurt by Other People so badly that they welcome isolation by COVID lockdown; sometimes they claim to have had enough solitude at last and to want companionship again. The "love" they want seems to include friendship, community, and worship as well as romance. Several of them affirm belief in God.

None of them is telling us much about the facts of her life that relate to the emotions she's expressing. As an older reader I found myself wanting to reply directly to some of these poems: "'I feel, I felt, I feel, I feel, I felt, I feel. Why? What was going on?" Persistent unpleasant feelings may identify a physical condition or an emotional complex, especially guilt or false guilt. 

Because the focus remains on the speaker's emotional mood in each poem, it's not easy to trace a plot structure, although this book has one. As coronavirus and its panic pass, global warming appears as a different kind of virus, a fever of the Earth. The characters in some poems toward the end of the book envision moving to different planets. 

But, though the last poem expresses hope, it may be about a delusion of hope. The narrator in this poem proclaims, "I am the chosen one." Chosen by whom, for what? Are we meant to recognize the Messianic Delusion as a symptom? Does the final virus produce insanity? These poems stand as, among other things, documentation of the emotional abuse our culture still inflicts on young introverts, but is the final statement something to do with the science-fiction-ish imagination toward the end (interplanetary experiments are being made and the narrator has been chosen for one), or does it express despair? Food for discussion...