courtneyfalling's review against another edition
dark
emotional
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? N/A
- Strong character development? N/A
- Loveable characters? N/A
- Diverse cast of characters? N/A
- Flaws of characters a main focus? N/A
4.0
I really liked this. Angry in the ways I needed it to be, reflective in the ways I wanted it to be. Absolutely will reread.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Sexual violence
kunavcr's review against another edition
challenging
dark
emotional
reflective
sad
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? N/A
- Loveable characters? N/A
- Diverse cast of characters? N/A
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
3.75
disquieting and at times discomforting, with a clever, measured style. certain turns of phrase and perspectives left a bad taste (see: tiresias), but otherwise a slow-building force of resonance.
favs: psalm, four marys, nightingale: a gloss, gokstadt/ganymede, marsyas
favs: psalm, four marys, nightingale: a gloss, gokstadt/ganymede, marsyas
madlymerc's review against another edition
5.0
TW: Sexaul Assualt
So, I confess - I've never read Ovid's Metamorphoses. However, I don't feel like that fact greatly hampered my enjoyment of this collection. Being unfamiliar with some of the myths and relationships at play in over-arching metaphors meant I had to look them up, which gave me time to linger over these poems more than I probably would have done if I knew what was what.
This collection is a stunner. Individual retellings of Ovid's myths are tied together with an unwinding reflection on the concept/metaphor/linguistic/literary implications of the nightingale that peaks in the poem "Nightingale: A Gloss". This stand-out prose poem takes up a staggering 17 pages at the center of the book and puts every page to good use. Rekdal uses this poem to reflect on other writings in the collection, her own writing process, the aftermath of sexual assault, and the poet's perpetual desire to parse the flesh of language and find its stone heart. My experience with Rekdal's writing in this collection exists in a chasm of resisting opposites - never has a writer made me feel such a potent cocktail of intimacy and alienation. Rekdal is here to tell you that language, a tool universally employed to bring order to concepts and express those concepts to others, falls short when addressing some of the most pivotal acts of violence and transcendence we experience as human beings. Our language is a failure in recounting the act, leaving us instead with negatives of our own experiences.
Nevertheless, Rekdal does provide the reader with some sense of justice in pieces like "Philomela", which sprouts discomfort between its lines like a garden and then blooms to a soothing/seething finish with the gift of a sewing machine and time. In "Gokstadt/Ganymede", Rekdal admits uncomfortable truths about trauma with a nakedness that is embarrassing and unequivocal: "When you sensed, what I hated:/some part of me loved you, not in spite of,/but because you had been raped.", that brings the reader into the darkness of loving while hurting and loving while healing.
Perhaps the most easily overlooked thing about this collection is the steady, elegant language that wraps itself around each piece, sometimes comforting, sometimes suffocating. This gift for the subtle image is apparent in many of Rekdal's pieces, but I enjoyed it most in "Telling the Wasps":
And so I fell among the wasps, whispering
your name into the hole I scooped
beside the marshy winter creek, where wind
now scours the freezing water. Where reed
on broken reed hums its numb refrain,
and love turns in its mud home, and sleeps.
So, I confess - I've never read Ovid's Metamorphoses. However, I don't feel like that fact greatly hampered my enjoyment of this collection. Being unfamiliar with some of the myths and relationships at play in over-arching metaphors meant I had to look them up, which gave me time to linger over these poems more than I probably would have done if I knew what was what.
This collection is a stunner. Individual retellings of Ovid's myths are tied together with an unwinding reflection on the concept/metaphor/linguistic/literary implications of the nightingale that peaks in the poem "Nightingale: A Gloss". This stand-out prose poem takes up a staggering 17 pages at the center of the book and puts every page to good use. Rekdal uses this poem to reflect on other writings in the collection, her own writing process, the aftermath of sexual assault, and the poet's perpetual desire to parse the flesh of language and find its stone heart. My experience with Rekdal's writing in this collection exists in a chasm of resisting opposites - never has a writer made me feel such a potent cocktail of intimacy and alienation. Rekdal is here to tell you that language, a tool universally employed to bring order to concepts and express those concepts to others, falls short when addressing some of the most pivotal acts of violence and transcendence we experience as human beings. Our language is a failure in recounting the act, leaving us instead with negatives of our own experiences.
Nevertheless, Rekdal does provide the reader with some sense of justice in pieces like "Philomela", which sprouts discomfort between its lines like a garden and then blooms to a soothing/seething finish with the gift of a sewing machine and time. In "Gokstadt/Ganymede", Rekdal admits uncomfortable truths about trauma with a nakedness that is embarrassing and unequivocal: "When you sensed, what I hated:/some part of me loved you, not in spite of,/but because you had been raped.", that brings the reader into the darkness of loving while hurting and loving while healing.
Perhaps the most easily overlooked thing about this collection is the steady, elegant language that wraps itself around each piece, sometimes comforting, sometimes suffocating. This gift for the subtle image is apparent in many of Rekdal's pieces, but I enjoyed it most in "Telling the Wasps":
And so I fell among the wasps, whispering
your name into the hole I scooped
beside the marshy winter creek, where wind
now scours the freezing water. Where reed
on broken reed hums its numb refrain,
and love turns in its mud home, and sleeps.
mepresley's review against another edition
dark
emotional
reflective
sad
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? N/A
- Flaws of characters a main focus? N/A
5.0
I enjoyed reading this so much. It was dark and violent and sad. It was loss and pain and grief and desire and longing. And it was fucking clever as hell, the way that she used the literary allusions / mythology, especially the Ovid. My favorite poems were "Nightingale: A Gloss" (which also plays with the Romantics, of course) and "Pear" but I also really, really loved "Four Marys," "Philomela," "Gokstadt/ Ganymede," "Marsyas," "Driving to Santa Fe" and "Pythagorean."
From Nightingale:
Is the metonym, finally, for Philomela art, or silence, or raving? Later
poets' use of the nightingale suggests she is able to sing about and
against suffering, but Ovid never mentions song. Instead, he symbolizes
Philomela and Procne by the murder of Itys: "And even so the red marks
of the murder/ stayed on their breasts: the feathers were blood-colored."
What is our longing to hear Philomela's song but our own desire for
retributive justice?....
What if it is the form, not the content, of The Metamorphoses that is
the terror? Each story unfolding into another, perpetually disrupting,
thus delaying the ending? What if, because we came to listen, we are the
reason the story keeps not ending? Why should Philomela sing, when our
presence only increases her suffering?
.....
In life, time's passage allows us to see ourselves change, but a poem's
chronology forces us to see repetition: lyrics time is not progressive but
fragmentary and recursive. Traumatic time works like lyric time....
Mourning is merely the process by which we remain frozen: the birds
always in flight, the hoopoe continually in pursuit....
The nightingale hovers between trauma and memory, its song meant to
bring one into concert with the other, to integrate event into narrative, to
bring pain out of the body and into language. But the song isn't heard, it's
longed for....
I have spent my life devoted to an art whose foundational symbol is one
of unspeakable violence. Did I seek poetry out for this? Or was I, that
day in the woods, made into a poet? Perhaps, whether we are changed
into our opposites or shrunk into the form that best defines us, some part
of transformation is always a curse.
From Nightingale:
Is the metonym, finally, for Philomela art, or silence, or raving? Later
poets' use of the nightingale suggests she is able to sing about and
against suffering, but Ovid never mentions song. Instead, he symbolizes
Philomela and Procne by the murder of Itys: "And even so the red marks
of the murder/ stayed on their breasts: the feathers were blood-colored."
What is our longing to hear Philomela's song but our own desire for
retributive justice?....
What if it is the form, not the content, of The Metamorphoses that is
the terror? Each story unfolding into another, perpetually disrupting,
thus delaying the ending? What if, because we came to listen, we are the
reason the story keeps not ending? Why should Philomela sing, when our
presence only increases her suffering?
.....
In life, time's passage allows us to see ourselves change, but a poem's
chronology forces us to see repetition: lyrics time is not progressive but
fragmentary and recursive. Traumatic time works like lyric time....
Mourning is merely the process by which we remain frozen: the birds
always in flight, the hoopoe continually in pursuit....
The nightingale hovers between trauma and memory, its song meant to
bring one into concert with the other, to integrate event into narrative, to
bring pain out of the body and into language. But the song isn't heard, it's
longed for....
I have spent my life devoted to an art whose foundational symbol is one
of unspeakable violence. Did I seek poetry out for this? Or was I, that
day in the woods, made into a poet? Perhaps, whether we are changed
into our opposites or shrunk into the form that best defines us, some part
of transformation is always a curse.
greciamj1958's review against another edition
4.0
I only read few poems for class but excellent read
stillnotstars's review
beautiful, lovelovelove. read this a while back but it's stuck with me ever since
Content Warnings
Moderate: Child death and Rape
kell_xavi's review against another edition
3.0
This collection is much like the pear: pale, crisp, sometimes juicy and fragrant, often dry and elusive in flavour.
the cool flesh
cellular or stony, white
as the belly of the winter hare
or the doe's scut, flicking,
before she mates. (Pear)
The cover is a gorgeous trace of the poems: the body, often female, made into art or seized or looked intimately upon or showing up in blank, stark language.
Perhaps the greatest desire a victim of violence has is to look at the violence dispassionately in memory. But remembering, the heart pounds, the body floods with adrenaline, ready to tear back off into flight... Poetry, with its suggestions that time and pain can be ordered through language, strains to constrain suffering. It suggests, but rarely achieves, the redress we desire. (Nightingale)
Paisley Rekdal writes a wonderful story. At the level of craft, she is a strong writer, intelligent and controlled in recited passages and original images—I have studied Ovid’s Philomela, and took some interest in Rekdal’s theory-driven personalization of the myth. But the poems that her stories take the form of are many times washed away, without closing or reaching their climax. Without spreading completely. Some of them attempt newness through the unusual body, another kind of metamorphosis: I didn’t like how “Io” approached disability, I wasn’t sure about where “Tireseus” was growing from.
I did like it, but the joy and longing I had from the five or six poems that ignited my senses—
The tree traffics
in a singular astonishment, its gold tongues
lolling out a song so rich and sweet, the notes
are left to rot upon the pavement. (Psalm (!!))
—wasn’t satisfied by the rest.
The best (for me):
Psalm
Four Marys
Nightingale
The Olive Tree at Vouves
Driving to Santa Fe
Pear
the cool flesh
cellular or stony, white
as the belly of the winter hare
or the doe's scut, flicking,
before she mates. (Pear)
The cover is a gorgeous trace of the poems: the body, often female, made into art or seized or looked intimately upon or showing up in blank, stark language.
Perhaps the greatest desire a victim of violence has is to look at the violence dispassionately in memory. But remembering, the heart pounds, the body floods with adrenaline, ready to tear back off into flight... Poetry, with its suggestions that time and pain can be ordered through language, strains to constrain suffering. It suggests, but rarely achieves, the redress we desire. (Nightingale)
Paisley Rekdal writes a wonderful story. At the level of craft, she is a strong writer, intelligent and controlled in recited passages and original images—I have studied Ovid’s Philomela, and took some interest in Rekdal’s theory-driven personalization of the myth. But the poems that her stories take the form of are many times washed away, without closing or reaching their climax. Without spreading completely. Some of them attempt newness through the unusual body, another kind of metamorphosis: I didn’t like how “Io” approached disability, I wasn’t sure about where “Tireseus” was growing from.
I did like it, but the joy and longing I had from the five or six poems that ignited my senses—
The tree traffics
in a singular astonishment, its gold tongues
lolling out a song so rich and sweet, the notes
are left to rot upon the pavement. (Psalm (!!))
—wasn’t satisfied by the rest.
The best (for me):
Psalm
Four Marys
Nightingale
The Olive Tree at Vouves
Driving to Santa Fe
Pear
kateegreenlee's review against another edition
i feel weird giving star ratings to poetry collections, so i’m not going to. some of these were excellent. others i was completely indifferent to. (sorry that’s my incredibly enlightening review—ganymede and nightingale: a gloss were the ones that stood out to me the most.)
cheydaytaylor's review against another edition
3.0
3.5/5, sometimes a bit too narrative in nature for me, but still captivating when the language leans more into its rhythm and image. Some stunning moments throughout and lovely, fresh plays with myth.