Fulfilling my obligations to my long-neglected TBR one book a time. Want to know why? I explain it in the first post here. Posting striking lines daily on BlueSky

For the second week in a row I read another one of the 50 books I got from Brick during the pandemic. I had no idea who Brenda Leifso was before I picked up this book. I also really only had a passing awareness of the women of Thebes. I am not enlightened on both these counts.

First, Brenda is a great poet. In addition to creating imagery that swings from the subtle to the surprising and back again, there is also a deeply sensual quality to the poems in this volume. And by sensual I mean using all of the senses. Too often poets ignore sound or scent in favour of sight. Brenda invokes all of our senses at various points in this book. Many of these poems hit so hard because they come at us from many different directions.

When I opened “Daughters of Men,” judging by the first few poems, I was expecting the entire book to be a collection of prairie elegies and domestic confessions. I was not expecting to have to find my way back to the sole undergraduate Classics course I took 30 years ago. A full half of this book is a series called ‘The Theban Women a Play in Verse.’ As she explains in a note at the end of the series, Brenda was inspired to write this sequence after stumbling across the ancient Greek play “The Bacchae” by Euripides while flipping through old university textbooks.

And now I am going to level one of the few criticisms I have. I actually would have loved to see that note as a FOREWORD to the sequence. That would have saved me a lot of pausing and looking things up as I read. My experience of the poems might have been smoother.

Now, that being said, this project I’m on is about slow reading and that is indeed what was needed for these poems. Slowness and, even more than usual for poetry, reading them out loud. For four consecutive mornings this past week the cats were treated with a little bit of entertainment to start their day. And it was worth the effort. This is a very good book.

If you follow me over on BlueSky, you already know I post lines I find striking every day as I slowly read through one book or issue each week. Here is a short stanza from the poem “Dionysus Seduces Pentheus and Sends Him in the Guise of a Woman to Hunt Agave”

ask if he’s tasted leaving
again and again
rosemary-oiled hair