This is a book of letting go, of wild avowals, unabashed eroticism; at the same time it is a work of integral imagination, steeped in the light of Greek myth that is part of the poet's heritage and imbued with an intuitive sense of dramatic conflicts and resolutions, high style, and musical form.
Okay, first of all, Olga Broumas teaches at the college I attend. I'm taking a class with her this year, and she's a fantastic little old woman, and I am incredibly biased. Incredibly. Biased.
At the same time, though, although I know she's very highly prized in "lesbian" poetry, I don't particularly like erotic poetry. It doesn't really appeal to me. Frankly, it makes me feel like I'm spying on a very private moment between people, despite that the author obviously chose to have it published and share that experience. Out of the poems in this volume, I greatly prefer the ones about womanhood in general and the ones about maternal relationships with other women. Also, I adore the ones about mythology and fairy tales. My weakness.
Seeing as Olga immigrated to America from Greece, it makes sense that she uses a lot of Greek mythology allusions in her work. I love them. I think, for the most part, they are spot on, and really add to the poetry. I love the way she interprets certain myths and fairy tales and makes them her own, uses them in relation to her own experiences. For example, "Cinderella" is fantastic, and both recounts (seemingly, it's obviously up to interpretation; this is only mine) how a woman felt when surrounded by the company of men, how oppressed she feels even when faced with "freedom" and also the way Cinderella in the fairytale was invisible to the people she worked for and heard everything. I love how in "Sleeping Beauty", she recounts her experience of being "awoken" by a "prince" in a modern-day retelling of the classic fairytale.
Another thing that's wonderful about Olga Broumas is her vocabulary. She uses words that you'd never expect to hear in poetry, like cesarean as just one example, and manages to make them flow perfectly and feel so beautiful. She uses language that is never used in everyday speech, but makes it seem very natural, not like she just looked it up in a thesaurus, which I think is extremely impressive considering English is her second language.
Personally, my favorite poems are "Maenad", for it's description of the slights and angers and strengths required of a common housewife pre-Women's Rights; "the knife and the bread" for it's violent, potent, tangible imagery and wonderful repetition of the word "knife"; and "Four Beginnings/For Kyra" because I love the way she describes the narrator's relationship with this woman in four meetings. It's short and yet it tells so much.
All in all, I adore this book, and these poems, and Olga Broumas in general. I desperately want to read more of her work. This was a fantastic book to have to read for class.
Recently, I was discussing poetry with my 20 yo feminist daughter and I told her about this book. Almost 40 years ago, it was assigned reading in college and it still remains one of my favorite books of poetry.
this was overall so insightful and beautiful. some poems gave me shivers and most were incredible some were just okay but not an issue really. very inspiring to live with zest and joy and pleasure
This is a phenomenal read. It certainly has some of the 70s/80s poetic stylings in it, but in a way that felt like the book was aching to satisfy curiosities and introspective capacities that have become recent and modern. The voltas in this book could foment a cloud into a thunderstorm.
One of my favorite books now and the best poetry I've read. Literally so good I can't say enough. As a queer person I related to the perspectives and you really get a sense of the author from her work :0)
Inspired, in turns, by Greek mythology, fairytales, and female poets of the past (Plath, Sexton, Plath, Woolf), Broumas weaved together luminescent and glistening imageries of female bodies, desires, imaginations.
Wow what a beautiful and tender read. She gets right to the part of you that is desperate for softness. Her words will hold that and write lyrics for them. Absolutely stunning. Highly suggest.
Caught my eye in a used book store, and I did enjoy it, but I think they may be best suited to a reader who is new to adulthood. I am curious to read more of her more mature work. Some lovely stuff here, though. Here's the last part of the poem "Circe":
What I wear in the morning pleases me: green shirt, skirt of wine. I am wrapped
in myself as the smell of night wraps around my sleep when I sleep
outside. By the time I get to the corner
bar, corner store, corner construction site, I become divine. I turn
men into swine. Leave them behind me whistling, grunting, wild.
--- Something about those lines makes me think of Ani DiFranco and Sylvia Plath ("I eat men like air") at the same time...
I’m not sure what a straight male has to say about a book of poems by a lesbian when so many of the poems are about sex. Go the cheap route and say that they are hot? Well, some are, but I detect an arc to the loose narrative. Broumas’s speaker (possibly herself) begins as a sexual predator, living for cheap thrills and organisms from whatever woman she can coax into bed. She ends tenderly, caring about the feelings of her last partner(s). Did she fool around and fall in love? I must read more of her work.
i hyped this up in my head since hearing a poet talk about it at a poetry reading. it was good poetry for sure, but nothing that reached out and grabbed my anything. i think i always tend to zone out on poems as soon as "god" or some other myth allusion is mentioned. my favorite line in the whole book "the eyes are live animals, domiciled in our head"