Abstract

By focusing on Heo Soo-Kyung’s war-related poems, this paper attempts to identify the point of divergence between the poems of the previous generation of female poets and Heo Soo-Kyung’s war poems. Depictions of war in Heo Soo-Kyung’s poetry include not only the Korean War but also the terrible pain caused by the atomic bomb as well as imperial violence. Beginning with her first collection of poems, Heo Soo-Kyung has demonstrated insight into war and has indirectly conveyed the horrors that follow war. In Heo Soo-Kyung’s war poems, women remember and record the daily lives of people left to survive in the aftermath of war. As a female poet belonging to the generation that experienced war indirectly, Heo Soo-Kyung uses archaeological methods to archive small bits and pieces that exist outside the written record. The “women’s time” that Heo Soo-Kyung discovers is meaningful in that it has not been captured by official history. This enables Heo Soo-Kyung’s war poetry to make the indirect experiences of war physical and shape the space of memory called the “body.” In Heo Soo-Kyung’s poems, sadness is treated as an emotion that expands and remembers the “small wars” of those who have been omitted from history or have disappeared since the war. As female strangers, Heo Soo- Kyung’s poetic subjects explore the weakest link broken by the war and make archives of things that have not been verbalized. In this context, Heo Soo-Kyung’s war poetry can be seen as possessing feminist attributes.