Later the house stood empty: poems

Melina Draper
Wed, 29 Apr 2026 13:46:19 PDT

"The poems contained in this thesis are set in the Rio de la Plata area of South America. The poems portray a speaker's relationship to the town and people of Colonic del Sacramento, Uruguay, and the city of Buenos Aires, Argentina. Most of the poems are free verse lyrics. However, there are some formal poems in the collection in blank verse, quatrains, villanelle, and sonnet form. Other formal concerns are explored throughout, such as use of alliteration and assonance, image, figurative language, enjambment, and the use of stanzas organic to each poem. Use of material from Charles Darwin's travels to this area as documented in his 1839 Voyage of the Beagle provides a historical backdrop to the collection. Argentina's Dirty War of the 1970's and the repressive Uruguayan dictatorship of the same period are addressed as one aspect of the collective consciousness of the region. Death, loss, disappearance, memory, and forgetting are explored throughout"--Leaf iii