On the island of Lesbos, the poetess Sappho wrote her many poems which she is known to have performed publicly. Considered the finest woman poet of her time (620-550 BCE), she was eventually ridiculed for her stated (in writing) sexual preferences. In the centuries since, her work has often been distorted and altered to remove any sense of homosexuality. Not so for the latest 21st-century translators. What exist now are principally fragments of her work—sometimes as little as a single word and occasionally the finest work practically complete.
Dan Beachy-Quick, in his recently published volume “—Wind—Mountain—Oak—” from Tupelo Press, endeavors to bring an even-handed edition of Sappho’s poems to the reading public. On pages 218 and 219, he presents one and two word fragments: “danger… / …down-blowing,” each on a single page. The first, alone, sends up signals, and the second, equally isolated, inspires images of earth, wind, and the fire of sexual passion. This is not unusual in this complete collection of the poet’s outpouring of emotional history.
While there are dozens of pages like this, now and then, the fragments grow considerably longer and seemingly full poems appear. This stanza, for example, opens the four stanzas and a coda which make up a poem on page 139 of Beachy-Quick’s book:
He appears to me as do those blessed Gods,
that man, that one man, who sits facing you,
sits close, sits near, listens to the articulate
music of your voice.
And ends with this:
Sweat pours off me like water as if I toiled long,
like a child, trembling takes hold of me
more green than grass is green, I seem to myself
almost dying to die…
…but the heart endures all, poor day-laborer…
Throughout the quick-to-read book we are reminded of the poets that Sappho’s fragments inspired: Emily Dickinson, Baudelaire, Chaucer, Shakespeare, and most decidedly Edna St. Vincent Millay. Read in sometimes awkward translations, more modern poets found Sappho’s constructions to be rambling road-signs to an imagery they could not ignore, could not forget.
This new collection, organized into sections, allows the reader to experience Sappho’s famous voice through her words, to “have some truer seed called self,”according to the translator. It is fascinating to find so much of the author in one collection, to discover the absence that leaves us with a subliminal picture of the poet, and then to find more compete and complex realizations of her mind. Dead by drowning, Sappho’s early fragment on page 64 seems to sum up the direction of her life:
Aphrodite
sweet-voiced
throwing
holding
I sit
you leap
sea-foam
Much more recent poems by Meredith Stricker comprise “Rewild,” a 69-page collection of her own poetry divided into four sections: “Staring Into the Atom” (10 poems), “Ashes” (2 poems), “Dark Matter” (4 poems), and “Unbuy Yourself” (6 poems). Stricker is not married to any particular form; she allows each poem to live in its own construction, and this, in part, keeps the work very much alive. In her work, she considers topics of specific interest, often outside her own personal preoccupations, and so the book takes on a universal, almost poetic news-cast vision of our world. She writes of computer searches (“things to buy”) and Safeway experiences (“Shopping Cart”), of differing views of nature (“The Bees,” “The Work of the Invisible,” “Flame Hive”), philosphical conjecture (“Chronology”).
She tackles the inescapable things most people never think about. Now, thanks to this poet, they don’t have to think too hard, just read her words and then apply personal reason to what is on the page.
Some of her work feels as fragmentary as the poems of Sappho, yet they are complete thoughts, often taking many words to accomplish. Still there is the sense of singleness and singularity about her poetry. I cannot think of another writer who expresses things the same way as Stricker; thus she is unique, a voice worth exploring
I thoroughly enjoyed reading “Rewild” and especially the poem “The Rewilding.” Nowhere is her allegiance to Sappho more specific and honored. It is a curious things to have these two books on my desk at the same time and it is a delightful thing, to boot, to share the concept of centuries of inevitable eternal expressed in two voices that offset one another.
