At the Close of Three Sisters, Chekhov

by Evelyn Hooven (June 2023)

Death and the Maiden, Egon Schiele, 1915-16

The doctor-poet that you were
Tells us the unclothed truth
Spare and again—
It will come
That moment when
Longing, wishes, love,
Parting, compromise
Fade to irrelevance
Before the death-fact.
___
The cause may be Trivial
(A spiteful duel, but
Straight to the heart)
The arena without yield, dry;
Our search for purpose
At the verge of hopeless
Alters nothing—or does it?

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Evelyn Hooven graduated from Mount Holyoke College and received her M.A. from Yale University, where she also studied at The Yale School of Drama. A member of the Dramatists’ Guild, she has had presentations of her verse dramas at several theatrical venues, including The Maxwell Anderson Playwrights Series in Greenwich, CT (after a state-wide competition) and The Poet’s Theatre in Cambridge, MA (result of a national competition). Her poems and translations from the French and Spanish have appeared in Parnassus: Poetry in Review, ART TIMES, Chelsea, The Literary Review, THE SHOp: A Magazine of Poetry (in Ireland), The Tribeca Poetry Review, Vallum (in Montreal), and other journals, and her literary criticism in Oxford University’s Essays in Criticism.

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