Customer Reviews

Beginning with O (Yale Series of Younger Poets)

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Olga Broumas's "Beginning With O" was required reading when I attended college in the late 1970s. Having read and re-read the book many times, I came away regretting that I was born male and could not, therefore, be lesbian. For these are love poems of the highest order--exquisitely crafted, dangerously erotic, and even comical, as when Broumas writes: "There are still other fluids/fecund,/tail-whipped with seed...." Broumas clearly owes a great deal to her spiritual ancestor, Sappho. A Greek by birth, Broumas shares Sappho's love for other women and, while more sensuous and erotic and less witty overall than the 7th century BC master whom Plato referred to as the "tenth Muse", her celebration of beauty rivals Sappho's own. Most satisfying is the section of "Beginning With O" titled "The Twelve Aspects of God" wherein Broumas reexplores classical mythology in the light of goddess-worship; her goddesses are potent, sexual, and often real women. The light she sheds is shimmering--more moonlight than sunlight, her words are not "winged" but fall from a wet tongue into dark places which are beautiful not only for their lunar sheen but for the darknesses themselves. Sappho wrote, "If you're squeamish, don't prod the beach rubble." Broumas delights in prodding; seaweed and cunt are words of celebration in her remarkable lexicon.

Olga Broumas understands the makings of the fantastic being. The book involves several types of fluid mixing -- mythology & history from her Greek heritage, shamelessly erotic flashes & soft touches, & some well-known western fairy tales & legends. For me, the climax of her cursive, unique language is in the second-to-last poem of the book, Little Red Riding Hood, in which she describes being born with her "mantle of blood" then elegantly, respectfully minding her mother's advice in life, which is "mind where you got to go, mind you get there," & a delicious amount of other world-wary stances. Between that poem & one of the first, Triple Muse, which ends, "We are of one mind, tuning our instruments to ourselves by our triple light," there is no slackening of vision.