Death of Persephone: A Murder,
Yvonne Blomer
Caitlin Press, 2024
One of the most unique collections of poetry that I’ve read in the last year or so is Victoria poet Yvonne Blomer’s latest book, Death of Persephone: A Murder. If you love myths, and you want to consider rethinking and upending the old story of Persephone, then this is the poetry collection you’ll want to read.
As Blomer writes in her acknowledgements, she wanted to explore “how women live in this world, set against assumptions of women and girls in Greek mythology and the Persephone myth specifically.” In this re-imagining of the original Persephone myth, the character of Stephanie takes on Persephone’s persona, and a city that is suggestive of Montreal becomes the setting. In Greek myth, when a woman is taken or wed, she is basically raped. And, yes, if you don’t know the story of the original myth, you should definitely re-visit it for all the fine details as I won’t rehash them here. Suffice it to say that Persephone did not willingly become Queen of the Underworld, to rule alongside Hades, but was taken against her will and then tricked into eating the pomegranate seeds, the food of the Underworld, that would make her feel a connection to the place even as she was at the same time repelled by it all.
Blomer has taken a postmodern stance to this myth, subverting the traditional tale that most people will know and reconstructing it in a contemporary, urban setting. In doing so, she encourages the reader to imagine Persephone in the body of Stephanie, a modern woman who walks through a city of “dark paths,” “not watching, not watching/she knows in her bones the way,” and who is “a woman tattooed in streetlights/and moody nights. Hidden spaces,/forgotten bones,/graves,/grains,/faces.” If you’re a woman walking at night, hyperaware of your surroundings as you make your way home, you will relate to the heightened tensions of being constantly on edge.
Blomer’s postmodern kaleidoscope of multi-layered allusions to myth, history, feminism, and the genre of crime fiction draws the reader in. In this new telling, Persephone is raised by her uncle, Uncle H (for Hades), and she ends up living in the tunnels of the subway system under the streets of Montreal. The poems follow on the heels of one another, creating a narrative arc that creates what ends up being a novel in poetic form. The man who tries to solve the murders of women who walk through the aboveground city is a detective named D.I. Boca. The reader will follow the plot of Stephanie’s story through a series of Boca’s case notes, all of which are numbered, linked sonnets. So, in “Case Notes: D.I. Boca No. 8/36,” the reader learns that, a decade ago, Boca “found a girl, dead,/her blood—memory a raised scar he traces./The graffiti, the paperwhites repeat/in pictures at every scene.” The murderer has left a graffitied calling card at each murder site. The original case, the reader learns, happened in Greece, years and years ago. There are paperwhites and a serpent in the modern-day sites as the murderer uses symbolic graffiti, all of which points symbolically to the original Persephone myth.
The repetitive graffitied murder motifs speak to how women walking in present times are still at risk of being assaulted or killed by men. In “Case Notes: D.I. Boca No. 11/36,” the detective encounters a woman named Thea (after Athena) who is perched up on scaffolding. Calling her down, he asks what she’s seen, trying to find a witness to a recent murder. “She nods. She knows men, she says, the city,/men rule it like roaches. Men think they can/do whatever and hate women while they do it.” What Thea does, to empower herself—and other women, as well—is paint a mural of Hecate on top of the images of the snakes. In “Hecate, Painted,” Blomer nudges her reader to remember that Hecate was really more of a wise woman than a so-called witch to be burned by men when she writes, describing the image of Hecate that is embodied in Thea’s artwork: “Her eyes look up,/glow in the light from the bowl of fire—/amber, ember, light./She is the witch./She is the ghost seer./She is triple goddess, moon phases./She is the watcher, eyes/on every dark corner.” By conjuring Hecate so vividly, Blomer gives the women in the poetic story arc of her collection the power they have always had, but which has often been derided and feared by men. She returns the power to the women in the story, asking her reader to reconsider the myth, who created it, and why it is so unsettling to juxtapose it into a contemporary setting. Nothing, it seems, has changed that much, and that’s where the worry sits in a reader’s mind.
Part way through the collection of poems, Stephanie manages to go to university. In “Stephanie Walks among Street Art” (after Banksy), she “walks the city” after having managed to get away from Uncle H by going to school. In this poem, the protective voice of the speaker says: “Keep your hands off her, Uncle H./She’s got your soul in the nail of her pinkie. All grown up/she’s done with you. Not an orphan, she cuts through your cloying,/she weeds you out.” In “Police Station,” Stephanie finally realizes that Uncle H. is a predator who “did jail time, child porn” and is “a person of interest” in the more recent murders of local Montreal women. She recalls when she first went to live with him, at the age of seven, and the narrative turns; she remembers her abduction.
A tone of terror is present in poems like “Instead of a Murder, Why Not a First Kiss” and “Scratch,” which depicts a woman walking home, being followed and assaulted, left to die. A man walks into the woman, crashing into her. She apologizes. He does not. Then, “The man turns and follows her. Violence a surge, a fist.” While he beats her, he “leans in as if/they are lovers. Drags her back to the alley they have just passed.” This is visceral, vivid imagery, and it needs to be to underscore the threat that women face every day. In poems like these, Blomer creates an overpainting or palimpsest of sorts, so that the story of the original Persephone myth is viewed through a modern-day feminist lens. Persephone’s story is Stephanie’s story, and it is still rippling through the ages, just as horrific and misogynistic in our day as it was in ancient Greece.
There is a story here, one that overlays the ancient Greek myth, and one which speaks to how violence perpetrated against women by men is always still happening. It occurs on a daily basis in cities and towns across the country, and one need not look far to find examples of how the violence is encultured and propagated by patriarchal systems, and how easily society wants to avert eyes and not look, to turn away and say that things have improved over time. This would be a lie, a myth. It leaves me wondering what Persephone herself would think as she’s been given a voice that she didn’t have in the original myth. In her work, Death of Persephone: A Murder, Yvonne Blomer has woven a complex story in poetic form, one that is stunning, well-crafted and structured, and just fascinating to consider from a philosophical, poetic, and feminist point of view.
Kim Fahner lives and writes in Sudbury, Ontario. Her newest book, a novel, is The Donoghue Girl (Latitude 46, 2024). Her next book of poems, The Pollination Field, will be published by Turnstone Press in 2025. She recently won first place for her CNF essay, "What You Carry," in The Ampersand Review's 2024 essay contest. As well, Kim was named as a finalist for the 2023 Ralph Gustafson Poetry Prize. She is the First Vice-Chair of The Writers' Union of Canada (2023-25), a member of the League of Canadian Poets, and a supporting member of the Playwrights Guild of Canada. She may be reached via her website at http://www.kimfahner.com
