Blog | Not This. Among the Goddesses; An Epic Libretto in Seven Dreams by Annie Finch |
I’m a fan of Annie Finch’s work and actually met her for the fist time at AWP when I purchased this book on the last day of the conference. When I finally got a chance to read this book, I was struck first by the ambition of the work, and second, by how wide a margin Annie Finch missed the mark she’d set for herself. Add more than a dash of Starhawk and other pop “Wiccans,” and other “easy reading” explorations of New Age consciousness with every cliche you can imagine about empowerment, mix in some stilted, wooden versification, and bind between slick covers and you have this volume.
Here’s one example from among many:
Hecate, Hecate, what have you told me?
First a death, then a rape, now a pregnancy?
Hecate, Hecate, now am I pregnant?
Hecate, goddess of the crossroads
looming above me, your face like a tomb,
as you enveloped my day with your darkness,
the oldest, haggard face of the moon
swung into place like a sky above me,
covering me with a solitude.
Of course, the minute one works with material like this one is immediately in the tradition and company of the great and near great English poets of the 19th, 18th, 17th, and 16th centuries. The echoes are there, but echoes are not enough. One must attempt to renew the mystery, the terror, the uncanniness, the “numinosity”–if you will–of all of these goddesses and crones and tutelary presences of the past. It’s not enough to tell us that Hecate is “the goddess of the crossroads”–with a..”face like a tomb”–and “like a sky…”–(????)–as Annie well knows–but it’s the poet’s job to make us feel it in our pulses.
The plot line is good, with many possibilities, but Annie chooses the easy route. Among the Goddesses seems more like a first or second draft than a final work. Perhaps that final work will come in the future, but this version is a disappointment. Jess
Red Hen Press
www.redhen.org
