From the volume:
Uranus (The Cosmic Dance)
spin daddy spin
whirl around the world
your long bright ribbons
for every living thing
turn me loose and flutter me
pull me tight again
revolve yourself
devolve yourself
spin daddy spin
*
she: I’m bored
he: you’re bored because you’re not passionate about anything
she: what do you suggest?
he: do something drastic
involve yourself
******
Review of Orpheus in Our World by Allan Briesmaster
Toronto: Verse Afire. September 2017
This unique book presents versions (not translations) of 66 Orphic Hymns: ancient Greek lyric poems whose lineage was purported to stretch all the way back to mythic Orpheus. On each right-hand page, facing the hymn on the left, the author has placed a response, not direct but broadly associative, in the form of a scrap of dialogue between a present-day “he” and “she.” In lieu of other commentary, this serves as a springboard for further reflection.
The hymns themselves…. encompass fundamental forces — Zephyrus (West Wind), Horai (the Seasons), personified human impulses — Eumenides (Vengeance), and philosophic concepts — Diké (Justice). Each hymn is a concentrated expression of awe, wonder and praise, sometimes with ambivalent reverberations….Never predictable or pat…this treatment unbinds deity after deity from any commonplace or merely reverential moorings.
Her lines can be…elegantly classical…. often close to invocation or prayer …finely encapsulated in the closing imperative of Oceanus: “grow back the god in us.” Each of the he-and-she dialogues is a …mini-debate, in a plain-spoken 21st century idiom, on the preceding hymn’s central theme. The contrast with the hymn could hardly be greater, and a much wider variation of tone from one dialogue to the next offers relief from the hymns’ lofty profundity.
The deceptively simple repartee of clashing through complementary gendered viewpoints injects lively energy, wit and even some humour. The dialogues’ overall casualness may seem to belie their serious side, but the message is clear. The age-old conceptions have not lost their relevance. Keeney’s approach here has a commendable daring to it [and is] particularly valuable as a portal to the worldview that lies at the roots of Western culture…. Imaginative and provocative in its poetics… it gives new life and accessibility to [this] …material: making the strange familiar, while conferring a refreshing strangeness on …mythology.
******
Review of Orpheus in Our World by M. Travis Lane,
Toronto: Fiddlehead. Winter 2018
Patricia Keeney’s Orpheus in Our World is extraordinary…formally inventive, and as translation, a tour de force. Keeney gives us two books: first, a new translation of the early Greek Orphic hymns, and, interleaved with the translation, comments… and reactions to these hymns [by a] contemporary couple. There is no “dialogue” between the couple and the hymns; the worlds, the times, are different….Part of the charm of the collection lies in our recognition of the gap between the two worlds, but, as well, in our recognition of how much this ancient world can still speak to us.
The Orphic hymns, probably composed in the third century Common Era, though perhaps earlier, represent the religion supposedly taught by Orpheus, and consist of praises directed toward divinities, cosmic entities and events, and admired virtues or abilities.
Keeney…chooses an English poetic style inherited from a polytheistic, warrior, agrarian/nautical society: the Vikings. Anglo-Saxon, with its short, vigorously stressed lines, (sung, we are told, with short lines, no gentled iambics) wonderfully conveys to us the liveliness and worshipful rapture of the Orphic hymns — and yet retains, for us, because it is not how we speak or think today, a reminder of the hymns’ antiquity….
After each … hymn Keeney gives us the conversation, suggested by or in reaction to the hymn, of a contemporary couple, “he,” and “she.” This material too is poetry, but does not imitate song, as the hymns do, but de-emphasizes stress and formal patterns, relying instead on a pattern of relationship between one remark and another: call and answer, surmise and critique, or accumulative repetition…. uncontrived, relaxed, playful, intellectually rhythmical….
Keeney’s contemporary couple share with the ancients a sense that disaster, including war, seems rather like weather, something that just happens — but, they do not admire the warrior qualities nor react rapturously toward “divine” power. Instead they are acutely aware…. Responding to “Nomus” (Universal Law), She postulates:
she: what if there is another force some manic conductor experimenting with every variety of cataclysm in the service of a perfect hidden pattern what if . . .
he: nonsense
she: what if neither science nor environmental abuse can explain it away?
he: you’re saying the same fanatical order that studs the night sky shoves tides around their salty beds shrinks and balloons the moon this insatiability when certainty gets boring simply stirs things up because it can?
she: and maybe because we’re supposed to learn something
Maybe….and this is as close to religion as Orpheus in Our World gets….A good read! I highly commend Patricia Keeney’s two worlds.
