From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. In a collection as good as her Pulitzer Prize–winning
The Wild Iris (1992), Glück gives the Persephone myth a staggering new meaning, casting that forlorn daughter as a soul caught in "an argument between the mother and the lover." Taken from Demeter, her possessive earth-goddess mother, and raped, kidnapped and wed by Hades, Persephone now faces the insatiable demands of both. In 17 multi-part lyrics centered in her familiar quatrains, Glück traces Persephone's arc from innocence to, unhappily, experience: "This is the light of autumn," she writes in "October," "not the light that says/ I am reborn." Two poems entitled "Persephone the Wanderer" flesh out her predicament ("What will you do/ when it is your turn in the field with the god?") and the self-deceiving responses ("you will forget everything:/ those fields of ice will be/ the meadows of Elysium") that drive the book. In between, scenes from a contemporary life (" 'You girls,' my mother said, 'should marry / someone like your father' ") parallel the unfolding myth, with Demeter coming to represent the body's desire to remain unchanged, or untouched, by love or death. That it turns out to be impossible is just another of the dilemmas brilliantly and unflinching dramatized in this icy, intense book. Empathic and unforgiving, the voice that unifies Persephone's despondent homelessness, Demeter's rageful mothering and Hades's smitten jealousy is unique in recent poetry, and reveals the flawed humanity of the divine.
(Mar.) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Few poets can shoulder the weight of myth the way Glück does. Here, in eighteen linked poems, she rewrites the legend of Persephone, offering the girl respite from centuries of being "pawed over by scholars." For Glück, the myth is, ultimately, "an argument between the mother and the lover— / the daughter is just meat." Glück's language, grave and precise, gives Persephone an elegant home in which to grow up. "The girl who disappears from the pool / will never return. A woman will return." Never overwrought, the poems brilliantly display a poet's insight, a mother's warmth, and a mortal's empathy. There is wry humor, too (Hades debates naming Persephone's Hell "The New Hell"), and, amid much that is dark, there are fragments of hope. In "October" we meet a young girl, scared on the subway: "you are not alone, / the poem said, / in the dark tunnel."
Copyright © 2006
The New Yorker
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