| Summary: | "If the Latin poet Ovid could be brought back to life in the twenty-first century, what kind of songs would Orpheus sing? What kind of poems would Ovid write? Since his art showed him to be a person of deep empathy for the natural and animal worlds, as well as for the human, he would probably be eager to take account of all that we have learned about them during the past two thousand years. He would be familiar with recent discoveries made by such investigators as Jane Goodall and Frans De Waal about the complex inner lives and societies of non-human animals, or by botanists such as Suzanne Simard and David George Haskell about the intricate interrelationships sustained in forests. In the human realm, he might find a suitably cataclysmic counterpart to the Trojan War in the barbarities and sacrifices of World War Two, or perhaps see an analogue to the Fall of Troy in the fall of the Two Towers in September, 2001. New Songs for Orpheus updates Ovid's poetry. Its poems look at and listen to the real creatures into which his characters were transformed in the Metamorphoses, and the act of transformation is viewed not as punishment or deprivation, but as a release into a form of life about which we have known far too little until recently. The collection also reinterprets Ovid's Heroides, his epistolary poems about heroic women, interrogating and revising the role of women in light of more contemporary values. A sequence of poems, for instance, focuses on letters written by Freya and Helmuth James von Moltke as he awaits execution by the Nazis for high treason: here, Eurydice becomes the survivor and mourner of her Orpheus. Finally, the songs of Orpheus become transformed into more contemporary shapes, as characters and incidents from the Canadian musical Come From Away--like those in Ovid's "restored" world after the Flood--are celebrated in a reaffirmation of community after the divisive horrors of 9/11."--
|
|---|
