"Lady Macbeth" This was the poem I thought least well connected to its title. "Damocles" I must have read this six times (at least) and other than the idea of his bad advice hanging over his head like a sword, I had no idea what it had to do with the character. Especially good was: "I am the seed from the soldier,/ worse than a bullet" and the subsequent exploration of the relationship between pain and evil. "Satan": This is a wonderful piece on the nature of evil and the way it hides within the human consciousness. "Morgan Le Fey": Another meditation on sexuality, this time exploring youth, power, and celebrity as part of this phenomenon. The lineation in this piece is strong, especially in the second stanza: His wife is pregnant again-each child "Rasputin": Again, mostly focused on just his story, but the image of Rasputin as a modern con man is well done and enjoyable. "Circe": This is not enjoyable per se, but it is a fascinating exploration of the power of sex and sexuality in affecting a person's behavior. Other poems contain this sort of lyrical brilliance, but these particular lines are among the best in the book. The end of the poem: Her brother beware,Īnd be cut into pieces" This piece also has some really wonderful descriptions, the Golden Fleece is "Dripping lanolin and ore" and Medea herself a "deadly orchid". "Medea": this is little more than the story of Jason and Medea, but the attitude is is one of ice-cold wit. On to the specifics! (If you so desire, you may stop reading now.) I'm not going to write separately about every poem, but about all the best and worst of the book. Overall, the poems are fairly dense, with a lot of meaning packed into each piece, most of which are one page long or shorter. The perfect example of this is in "Salome" Salome sways with her drink. Every poem is a different character, either real or fictitious, and even when she is describing motion, she gives the impression of looking at a statue. Frieda Hughes does a great job with the motif of "waxworks". At times it was absolutely fabulous, at others it seemed silly or downright incomprehensible.įirst things first, general impressions. This collection was harder to place than its four-star rating might imply. "Medusa," "Samson," "Sisyphus," "Lucrezia Borgia," "Lazarus." At the end of the day, it's a quick read and a refresher on many key figures in Western lit. Re-reading some of the poems, they are more like simple prose than poetry. Her style is close to the type of poetry that I gravitate to-direct and not very flowery-but at times it feels clunky. The poems are unpretentious (unless you consider Eurocentrism a form of elitism). Some of the poems provide a twist on the classic version of the characters, but many of them aren't very original and are merely poetic(?) summaries of the characters' canonical stories. The author conveniently provides a glossary at the end of the book in case you aren't familiar with the subjects. The majority of poems focus on allusions to Western literature (Greek myths, the Bible, Grimm's fairy tales, Shakespeare) but there are a few real people, too. Hughes avoids the trap that many poets fall into when writing a thematic book-the characters in her poems are varied enough to prevent the entire collection from becoming repetitive.
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