Poetry Magazines - The best collection of poetry magazines online - Simon Armitage

Kazantzis has chosen to let the characters of the Odyssey speak, and if that sounds dull, or evasive, think again: it makes for outspokenness about the goings-on between men and women, uninhibited by autobiography, or at any rate direct autobiography. For her The Iliad is about men and men, while The Odyssey is about men and women. The gods and monsters are metaphors.

     These “fictions on the Odyssey of Homer” have their own poetic structure; they’re not items that should expand into short stories, and they can be very perky. It took a woman to write the masculinist poem a lot of men must have been waiting for, though of course it’s tongue-incheek. “There is something weird about them... They lie, cheat, gut their husbands...”:

                But you’ve
got to get on top of them, and I mean that
in both senses. That’s why when the man
really makes love, it gives him the kingdom,

for about thirty seconds in my experience.

     This is Odysseus wondering how not to be turned into a pig by Circe. And ‘Lick you sir?’ is the only convincing version of ‘what song the Sirens sang’. It shows how spicy this oblique mythological stuff can be when crossed with daring realism.

     A monster brooded over Odysseus’s whole trip. It had many names - Skylla, Polyphemus, Charybdis, Poseidon himself, but: “Anyone can find reasons for evil./ I’m still trying.” The whole narrative is a search for Athene, wisdom, who will be there on the beach at Ithaka. A nice irony, though, is then a modern-sounding letter that notes “... a massacre of young men / by a mad old loony in Ithaka,/ someone claiming to be King Odysseus”. The story ends with two old people staring into the fire, perhaps mythologising their memories.

     The strategy recalls Auden’s when he used The Tempest’s characters in The Sea and the Mirror, but some of the poems evoke the more beautiful bits of The Cantos, and there’s a movement to her line that’s both natural and crafted. She can also break into an antique lyric:

Of beautiful Kalypso tell
but where she grows her loveliest hair
              Odysseus swears

he will not tell for all the world
to run its fingers through such curled
              and spiralled hair...

     This is a beautifully published book too, with etchings by Jacqueline Morreau and the kind of comely paper and typeface poetry used to have and needs.