A Note on “Five Danses Macabres”

            The five poems in the current Notre Dame Review come from a sequence of thirty-four sonnets called Danses Macabres.  It’s a series of contemporary takes on the ancient Dance of Death motif, in which Death comes in person to take us all away, leading us off in a darkly festive dance.  One variant is the Death and the Maiden legend, in which a young woman’s sexual seduction by the figure of Death becomes inextricably entwined with her destruction.  My sources range from medieval woodcuts and Renaissance paintings, to the Romantic revival of the motif in the music of Schubert and others, to the modern devastations of war and genocide, to imagery from the violent world in which we must live.  Yet I intend many of the poems to be peculiarly funny.  They chronicle our necessary but ultimately futile resistance to death through our human resources of sexuality, artistic imagination, and humor.
            Danses Macabres stands as the second half of a recently completed manuscript called The Code of Terpsichore, whose overall theme is dance in many of its manifestations and symbolic roles.