Kim Fahner : Death of Persephone: A Murder, by Yvonne Blomer

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

Yvonne Blomer and Barbara Colebrook Peace : Imagined and Real Conversations with P.K. Page

 

 

“…..How to capture self here,
to spin and weave each new story
on the ancient fabric of soil and sun.”
                       Yvonne Blomer, What Tapestry, Hologram: Homage to P.K. Page

I confess, I never had a close relationship with P.K. Page, but I danced, like one of the dancers in her own sketches, in her periphery. When she was alive and living in Sidney, B.C., I was too young and shy to approach, too foolish feeling to ask a question or send a poem. This is just the way things go sometimes, there’s no point in beating myself up about it now, but I would have loved to have sat with her and talked poetry, or to have sent her a handful of poems. She perhaps would have seen in those early poems the influence of her own work and that of Patrick Lane’s.

Before diving even deeper into P.K. I want to, for a moment, speak to the legacy of poetry and the written word. This rises out of a class I’m currently teaching on Japanese form and aesthetic. In the class, I aim to stay close to the original Japanese writers of haibun and haiku and with my students we are diving into history, culture, women’s lives through Sei Shonagon and wandering poet’s lives through Matsuo Basho. It is a wonderous form of travel to delve into the poetry of another place and time. I believe this is also part of the invitation of the anthology Hologram: Homage to P.K. Page. I don’t want to be a walking advertisement, but I do want us to remember that Canada too has a long oral and written tradition from Indigenous story tellers to the writers of today and P.K. is one of those key writers. In fact her book And Once More Saw the Stars is a woven conversation with Philip Stratford using the Japanese form of renga. Here, Barbara Colebrook Peace and I are intertwining our voices to connect them to P.K.’s and the many voices in Hologram.

If you are younger than me, and not from the west coast of Canada, you might not even know who P.K. Page is. I understand that poetry does not have a shelf life, like a bunch of bananas do (Basho is Japanese for Banana tree, funnily enough), but I also understand that we live in the “now” and that young poets are looking to what is new, edgy, perhaps political, identity-focused, important as in American or world poetry for their inspiration. They aren’t necessarily looking in their own garden, city or coastal community. But I’d like to invite all us readers of poetry to find P.K. Page again or for the first time, to allow her to be one of the poets we might turn to, like W.B. Yeats, W. H. Auden, Langston Hughes, Elizabeth Bishop, Emily Dickinson or Ondaatje and Atwood. She was a great writer and mentor; she was an enthusiast when it came to life and poetry, and she was a master of form.

With my own recent dive back into P.K.’s work through my work as editor for Hologram I have reread her poems, read the poems that have been written because of her and the attachments and memories that so many writers in Canada have to her.  Hologram: Homage to P.K. Page offers a slice of Canadian poetry history through P.K. and the poets who write from her poems. It shows how, like mycelium, poets are deeply rooted and connected to each other, to the poets of the past and to the younger poets of the future.

Contributor, Barbara Colebrook Peace and I had a brief conversation when she came to my house to pick up her copies of Hologram. During that conversation she shared other memories of her connections to P.K. 

*

“Our feet barely touched the earth, and memory
Earased at birth, but gradually reassembling
Coalesced and formed a whole, as single birds
Gathering for migration form a flock.”     
--P.K. Page, “Presences”

Barbara writes:

Reading this anthology, I find myself remembering times with P.K. Page— like the time before I had met her in person, and before I took up writing poetry. I was in my mid- thirties, a volunteer with the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria’s “Gallery in Schools” programme.  Among the works of art we took into the schools, was a beautiful etching by P.K. Irwin called “Ship—Nocturnal.” Though I didn’t know her, I knew she lived in Victoria, and I phoned her to ask about it.

“Oh Yes, I remember that piece very well.  It started from a mistake!”  she said. She went on to tell me the story of how she set out to make an etching, with no particular idea of what the subject might be.  At the beginning, she accidentally made an ink blot. That ink blot — by the reverse process of etching — became a silvery star. Over what?  Over an otherworldly, dreamlike, ghostly ship, with the night sky appearing through the ship’s outline. 

When I visited the schools, I told this story to the children: a work of art can begin from a mistake! They loved it and were inspired. This story has given me some confidence in my own mistakes. Later, for instance, when I was working on a poem called “Jesus in the Nursing Home,” our cat jumped up on my computer keyboard and strode across it.  The accidental result became Jesus stammering: “PpppPaa, / he says, Ppppp Aaaa…”  I treasure this memory of PK before I knew her. Like the silver ship of her etching, it has an otherworldly quality which speaks to me this morning of her presence in one of the infinite, cosmic dimensions she wrote about.

Another memory dates to a time when Linda Rogers invited me to co-edit a book of essays about PK’s work. A group of poets was sitting round the table at lunch and PK asked simply, “Describe your ideal house.”  It was fascinating to hear the variety of answers.  When it came to my turn, I described a house with big windows, high on a hill where the light and dark came and went continually, where there were shadows, and where there was only a little furniture but an abundance of space. PK was the last to speak, and as I recall, her “ideal house” was similar to mine, which gave me a lovely sense of a bond with her. 

I feel that I will never come to the end of my discoveries of PK.  I am personally very grateful for the way the anthology’s offerings connect with my own memories and bring PK’s living presence before me in new ways.

*

I find such delight as I read Barbara’s memories here in the link between her visual art and her poetry, in the lesson of the mistake become a silver bursting star and in how that inspired students and Barbara herself. I probably overstate how much poetry to me is a conversation with the self that then becomes public and want to add to that idea that the poem becomes public, but so does the conversation, and it becomes collective too. So, as an editor of this new anthology, my wish is for the conversations of these poems and memories, as well as P.K.’s poems and art to ignite more conversations, art and poetry.

Barbara and my conversation continues as we dip back into the book, or our books by P.K. and then pick up pen and dip into our own new poems. As Barbara recently wrote to me, “I too am very fond of And Once More Saw the Stars and I like the correspondence between the two poets just as much as I like the poems. I remember Philip says, somewhere in there, how much he’s enjoying working with P.K. and ‘it’s just like dancing with you,’ which fits with what you say at the beginning of this article!”

Thank you P.K. Page, Barbara Colebrook Peace, DC Reid (co-editor and creator of this project) and all the academics and poets in Hologram: Homage to P.K. Page!

Yvonne Blomer and Barbara Colebrook Peace

 

 

 

 

 

Yvonne Blomer’s The Last Show on Earth (Caitlin Press, 2022) explores grief, love and climate change. She has edited five anthologies, most recently: Hologram: Homage to PK Page. She is the past poet laureate of Victoria, BC, and was 2022-23 Arc Poetry Magazine poet-in-residence. Yvonne teaches on Zoom and lives on the territories of the Lək̓ʷəŋən (Lekwungen) people. Forthcoming this fall is Death of Persephone: A Murder with Caitlin Press. Yvonne also has a call out for poems on ice https://caitlinpress.com/Blog/Call-for-Submissions-ICE.

 

 

 

 

Barbara Colebrook Peace is the author of two poetry books, Kyrie and Duet for Wings and Earth, both published by Sono Nis Press, and the co-editor of P.K. Page: Essays on Her Works published by Guernica. She has read her poetry on CBC, and taken part in various literary festivals and concerts.  She was delighted to learn recently that one of her poems was translated into Chinese!  She lives in Victoria B.C.

 

 

Yvonne Blomer : Notes On Travel

 

 

inspired by Phil Hall’s amazing poem “Blurbs”

 

 

 

To travel is to enter the space of others and to walk among them an other.

To be invited to read in a large city across the country from one’s own, a gift and an opening.

…but the forecast for my once rainforest island, often called the “wet” coast, is sun, some cloud, no rain, all the way into late October. Past Thanksgiving.

Any one place, only one voice. If I stay here, how will my voice travel?

I want some accolades. My books to sell. To be read. But the airplane: flight from YYJ to YYZ is 12 metric tons of CO2 per passenger.

One hour of Zoom videoconferencing or streaming emits 150-1000 grams of C02.

If only – the act of writing a poem were a simple act: to place my hand in the hand of another; to emit nothing but fragrance (ink from dried flowers), texture (paper made from chewing and dried in the sun). Or just my voice.

I’m thinking of the cumulation of CO2 over time. Each flight could be the flight that does it: the burn that burns. Leads to the desertification of an African nation. Flooding in India. The loss of the elephants. Loss of rain on this west coast.

Hyperbole is a form of metaphor. Possibly also fear mongering. Climate Anxiety is tangible.

Next summer my family will fly to the UK. My dad will be 84 at that time and his final sibling 87. We will go for as long as we can. The valves of our hearts will pump each bump and burn, each takeoff and landing.

Trains in Canada are old and emit as much CO2 as a flight.

Either travel or don’t. Either breathe or travel. Either feed the world or travel. Either save the polar bears or travel. 

I love to travel. My book is called Book of Places. But there is something sitting, a creature, between Covid and Climate, holding me here. Also in a #twobookyear The Last Show on Earth.

Recently, author and radio broadcaster, Bob MacDonald spoke of the already existing technologies to solve the CO2 and warming issues. Why are humans so slow?

I’ve lost the poem (I thought I was writing) to facts. 

The fact is: many people don’t care.

The fact is: Many people do care. I am not the only person reconsidering flying. I am not alone.

The fact is I’ve just talked myself out of flying to Ontario to do two readings.

Zoom me in oh planners and organizers. Let my voice come and my body stay.

Avoid the car, avoid meat, cheese, butter. Avoid the clothing drier now that the sun is sticking around these short fall (short-fall) days. Avoid gluttony too. Raise your fist to the 1% (many are not thinking). 

Avoid hope. Though this week I heard the term “non-naïve radical hope.” Hold that.

Avoid sloppy sentiment (the howl of the heart).

Did the Prime Minster recently fly back and forth, back and forth for photo ops? He’s slightly younger than me; about a year behind me in age. I assumed he’d do better. I thought his relative youth would make him act more, what? What am I thinking? This is full-on naïve wishful thinking-ness.

I hold a book of poems in my hands. It is another human thing. In my voice are the voices I carry within: of doubt and wisdom, climate change and fear, strength and vulnerability.

Bob MacDonald says that our gas cars use 20% of the gasoline and the other 80% just burns into the air. He said picture putting only $20 in and then holding up the nozzle to the air and pumping $80 worth to the ground.

Poet Brenda Hillman has a poem called “Moaning Action at the Gas Pump” which I can never get out of my head: “Inside the pump you can hear a bird, a screech-covered pelican lugged out of the Gulf...”

My poems too want to stick in heads. They want to speak out. My poems don’t want another species lost so they can speak out.

I love to travel but I have travelled.

I’m not sure I believe in government controls, but recently I conceded I was a socialist.  I do believe in people helping people/animals and other creatures too.

Some say (we all know) that there is only one earth. One blue bowl I like to say. The field of poetry so small.

What is out of proportion? Humans are. Bob MacDonald gave hope for the present but still, too many humans, we are out of proportion.

So. I’m not going to fly to Ontario but I am going to fly soon. I’m going to be careful. But not 100% careful. The tally is skewed. Recently I saw the term “imperfect environmentalism.” Perhaps that’s me.

My ability to choose, skewed.

Skewed too, this thin white covering on my bones and tissue. This mammal: primate: homo sapiens: human who gets to choose.

*

 

With non-exact quotes from Bob MacDonald’s presentation at Victoria Festival of Authors on October 2, 2022 and his book The Future is Now. With the line “The field of poetry so small” from “Blurbs” by Phil Hall published in Periodicities: a journal of poetry and poetics. The notion of “non-naïve radical hope” comes from Julie Sze. And quoted lines from Benda Hillman’s book Seasonal Works with Letters on Fire, Wesleyan University Press, 2013.

 

 

 

 

Yvonne Blomer lives on the traditional territories of the WSÁNEC´ (Saanich) peoples of the Coast Salish Nation. Her most recent book is The Last Show on Earth, Caitlin Press, 2022. This fall Palimpsest Press released Book of Places 10th Anniversary Edition with new poems and layout. Yvonne’s poetry books also include As if a Raven (Palimpsest Press, 2015), and the anthologies Refugium: Poems for the Pacific and Sweet Water: Poems for the Watersheds (Caitlin Press, 2017 and 2021). Sugar Ride: Cycling from Hanoi to Kuala Lumpur is her memoir exploring body, time, and travel. Yvonne is the past Poet Laureate of Victoria, B.C.