Blood Dazzler by Patricia Smith is a collection of poems largely about Hurricane Katrina and her effects on the people of the Gulf Coast. Her poems are extremely powerful and truly capture the emotions, thoughts and actions surrounding the horrific disaster.
My favorite poem of the collection is called “Katrina” on page 31. The poem personifies the hurricane, emphasizing her hunger for destruction. Smith describes Katrina as being “birthed…elsewhere” (Katrina 1), and the use of the word “birth” makes me feel immediately empathetic towards the body of water. I feel as though this body was born under uneasy circumstances with the use of the word “restless” (Katrina 1), and that she was pushed forward and propelled toward her destiny by an unknown cause.
The overall tone of the poem is violent, accentuated with the descriptions of the destruction Katrina caused, but somehow I still feel empathetic towards her. She “broke through branches, steel” (Katrina 3), destroyed the very fabric of peoples’ lives, in addition to causing the deaths of “elders, fools, and willows” (Katrina 9), but the use of the word love instead of kill in the seventh line curbs my anger towards her. She “loudly loved the slow bones” (Katrina 7), not “violently killed.” This choice of words curtails the hatred that builds for Katrina after her birth in the first line, and increases my compassion towards this ferocious catastrophe.
I believe the personification of Katrina in this poem is what causes me to feel empathetic towards her. The use of the description of birth in the first line of the poem, and death in the last line makes me feel as though I have known Katrina her whole life. In addition to the hate I have for her for causing so much death and destruction, I also have a strange feeling of sympathy towards her, which makes for an overall conflicting tone of this poem.
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