Award Date
May 2019
Degree Type
Thesis
Degree Name
Master of Fine Arts (MFA)
Department
English
First Committee Member
Donald Revell
Second Committee Member
Claudia Keelan
Third Committee Member
Donald Revell
Fourth Committee Member
Claudia Keelan
Fifth Committee Member
Emily Setina
Sixth Committee Member
Jeff Burden
Number of Pages
55
Abstract
The Ruins of Doves is a collection of 40 poems that attempts to access the conversational space for the poet’s encounters with her environment, and correspondingly, with the divine. Keeping with this sentiment, each poem embodies a little song or prayer, where the poem itself acts as a gateway in attempting to understand the divine. Amid the quietness in the space of the poem is where the poet explores her relationship with the divine. An understanding of community, domestic love, and intimacy share a point of arrival where many of the poems begin. Each poem is an accumulation and a culmination of encounter and experience, in which time functions as a door of revolving opportunity, and the notion of “the hour” is beyond constraint in questioning our traditional idea and treatment of time. The poems provoke two central questions: How do we find intimacy and privacy when so much within our world has become so public and general? How do we seek unity in the idea of our private self and our public self? Though in asking these questions, the poet also seeks to become an expansion of her surroundings and questions boundaries or points of separation between herself and other creatures and elements of nature that are within observation. Many of the poems are oriented around the idea of twoness or multiplicity, in having an understanding that two beings can inhabit a single space or a single universe within time as separate beings who are whole in their singularity, yet who are also able to be joined together in the intimate space that is the poem. The poems are not intended to settle anything or to find resolution; they accrue within the livable space of the poem rather than seeking to mean.
Disciplines
Creative Writing
File Format
Degree Grantor
University of Nevada, Las Vegas
Language
English
Repository Citation
Yusofzei, Mariah Tahera, "The Ruins of Doves" (2019). UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones. 3707.
http://dx.doi.org/10.34917/15778579
Rights
IN COPYRIGHT. For more information about this rights statement, please visit http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/