Galatea (Salt Modern Poets S.) [Paperback]

Melanie Challenger (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 1844712907 | ISBN-13: 978-1844712908 | Publication Date: October 1, 2006

In Galatea, her first collection, Challenger casts a poet's sensitive eye across the hours of a tumultuous century to create startling poems whose voice - resolute, compassionate, original - both celebrates and mourns the tensions of human nature. Drawing her themes from the Pygmalion myth, Challenger portrays her subjects in trembling poise between action and inaction, consummation and defeat.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Melanie Challenger's first collection of poems, Galatea (Salt Publishing: 2006), received the Society of Authors' Eric Gregory Award and nomination for the Forward Poetry Prize for Best First Collection. She is Creative Fellow at the Centre for the Evolution of Cultural Diversity at University College London, and Associate Artist at Cambridge University's Institute of Astronomy. She lives in the Scottish highlands. D;

Product Details

• Paperback: 76 pages
• Publisher: Salt Publishing (October 1, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1844712907
• ISBN-13: 978-1844712908
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.4 x 0.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 4.2 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,969,251 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5.0 out of 5 stars Black and White--What's in a name?, July 27, 2007

By 

Sheik Pierre (Bronx, NY) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Galatea (Salt Modern Poets S.) (Paperback)

What's in a name? The etymology of Melanie is "black or dark-skinned" and Galatea is "she who is milk-white." From these origins we have flesh made word in the text and page before us. Galatea, whether body or statue, casts the same dark shadow. In this case what lies in shadow is not evil, but truth--what Robert Graves must have had in mind by suggesting the myth depicts the overthrow of the matrilineal cult.

Challenger writes:

Strangeness comes to us all at the limits of Eros,
Where tenderness, by the gradual erosion
Of each small act of worship, mercerises the flesh
Of the love-feast, rendering the body revelational.

Like the palindrome, Eros saw I was sore, Romanticism is a vicious cycle that must be broken. You can't eat Hope. Tenderness has left us to chemically treat the body as if each pill were the small act of worship. Mercerise could also render a mercer out the tenderness as in legal tender--money is made of cotton. Mercerising increases the luster and affinity for dye. So what does that teach us about the body? We are born and given a birth certificate with a name on it to be bought and sold as a product--willingly or unwillingly. So what is revelational is not ecstacy, but a spiritual apocalypse in order to identify the body without giving it a name. It is a complete erosion of the self-constructed self and the socially-constructed self. To put it quite simply Challenger reminds us what it is to be human. Easier said than done, and she does it here.