The Woodlot

By Chris Banks

“Blame the girl, / her uncle’s obsessions.”

I have to admit I’m not really one for books of poetry that blur distinctions between novels and poetry (yes, both have patterns, but poetry’s patterns are usually different from that of a novel’s plot, subplot, character development, etc.), and Yvonne Blomer’s Death of Persephone – A Murder out with Caitlin Press also takes a well-worn myth that has been respun before, most notably by Louise Glück;  however, Yvonne Blomer makes it new by weaving the personal, our own flawed world, misogyny, missing women, into a classical Greek tale.

Shara McCallum in her essay “Myth, Persona, and the Personal” states, “if you are going to rewrite a myth, you need to do something different, in part to justify repeating a tale that has been rehashed countless times” (Mentor and Muse: Essays from Poets to Poets), so that is exactly what Yvonne Blomer sets about doing by creating a dramatis personae that looks more like a terrific Friday night mystery whodunnit, rather than an old familiar Greek tale: Persephone is Stephanie, Hades is Uncle H., Thea the graffiti artist is Athena, and there are other characters, like the police detective D.I. Boca, that do not appear in the original story.

Blomer’s poetry collection requires you to read the police reports, the case notes, the myriad poems and the crime scene photos, in succession, which is not my favourite way to read poetry, as I like to dip back and forth, from the end to the beginning, but after some initial hesitancy, I settled in like a hard-boiled detective, and read the first section “Chapter One: Detective Inspector Boca” where the detective’s “notes” form sonnets:

Case Notes: D.I. Boca 		No. 5/36

The past hovers: a wail, a siren that wakes
him. He’d usually roll over, bury
his head. This night he rises, gets dressed, walks
out into the city, follows the sound.
Memories weave these city streets, old beats.
He’s worked homicide ten years. What’s he
doing? He shrugs in his slack coat. At the scene
Nico, his cousin: “One more beaten woman,
one more bouquet of flowers, no snake
painted on site yet”—each symbol as cheap
as the last, or he’s lost the plot, never
had it     that knack for really seeing.
“Hey cuz,” Nico greets him, “guess this one’s yours,”
tips his hat, as his eyes slide down Boca.

Here the mystery is a mask for the misogyny and sexual violence and fear of predatorial men that permeates are own society and not just this poetry collection.

Other aspects of the original myth abide, but the Underground in Blomer’s tale is a subway Metro, and Hades owns a Souvlaki place where Stephanie works, and in the poem “A Stranger Calls”,  a stranger Helios reveals the truth of why Stephanie grew up with her uncle. 

The book is a plethora of poetic forms and allusions, but the narrative patterns the book creates are more novelistic in its settings, its shifting from one character to the next, its jumping between plot advancements and questions swirling around the mystery of who is killing young women in a city that itself is a stand-in for the fear inherent in all women, as Blomer writes, “Fear is a city in every woman. And the police?— / a clique of men.” It is this fear that haunts the Underground and the city streets, and I temporarily forgot that “Stephanie” herself becomes a crime scene victim whom detective Boca has to find justice for.

Of course, the real meaning of this mystery is that violence against women has existed since antiquity, and so whether its the classical Persephone or Blomer’s revisioning or retelling of her as“Stephanie”, the fact that young women are still murdered by men is a fact that should not be buried in a dusty police file in an evidence locker which the beginning of this next poem makes clear:

 I don’t usually read verse novels but I’m glad I read Yvonne Blomer’s Death of Perspephone: A Murder out with Caitlin Press, if only to remind myself poetry is written in a polyphony of voices, an array of forms and structures, and like in any good ole fashioned mystery novel, things in poetry are not always what they seem. Blomer’s images unearthed from the classical myth- the Underground, the flowers, Hades, and Persephone– become more than their old dusty “selves” and take on new conceptual significance in this book, which is what all good poetry does: it takes something old and familiar, and makes it new.  And unfortunately a lot of the new knowledge Blomer is communicating is also old knowledge: misogyny and violence against women is a societal aberration that not even poetry can easily solve.