Allan Brown, Powell River, BC

  The great wind of the spirit blows vigorously through this new poetry collection by Susan McCaslin on her old/new theme of the abduction and recovery of  Persephone (Kore) by her mother Demeter. The poems develop persistent human themes of personal relationships and civic/political formulae, new discoveries and old memories, deceptions and revelations.

  The great wind of the spirit blows vigorously through this new poetry collection by Susan McCaslin on her old/new theme of the abduction and recovery of  Persephone (Kore) by her mother Demeter. The poems develop persistent human themes of personal relationships and civic/political formulae, new discoveries and old memories, deceptions and revelations.
   Different voices speak throughout the book. The mother’s words are both painful and powerful as “I have torn the garlands from my hair / to declare here a dreadful peace” (“Demeter Speaks Truth to the Powers”). Aware of being both herself and not herself, the daughter “walks in my own tracks awake as one dead among the dead” (“Persephone in Hades”) – originally titled “Persephone Walks the Valley of the Shadow,” whose biblical echoes will sound again later in the collection.  The poet herself (who or whatever that self may be) follows and reports on the Truth Speaker as “Grief-embedded // like a journalist in a foreign land” (“Demeter Wanders the Globe”).
   Many of the poems have appeared previously in other forums, evidencing McCaslin’s extensive publication activity. The most significant of these is Persephone Tours the Underground, issued in May, 2009 as a single-print chapbook by the Alfred Gustav Press (North Vancouver). The volume contains eight poems, all reprinted here (two with slight alterations) along with a very useful statement of her “Poetics” in which she speaks of her interest in the ancient myth and its relation to “the sights and sounds of our complex underworld village” and, most significantly, how the writing produced and defined itself in “the play of voices” of Persephone, Demeter, and also herself, “as living figures.
   McCaslin skillfully blends the political and the personal aspects of the village and – to expand her image – the city that Demeter Goes Skydiving has become. She appears as a character in her own book (in the section “Old Love”), both familiar and strange,  in the satiric and suggestive “Border Boogie (1969),” reprinted from the anthology Crossing Lines: Poets Who Came to Canada in the Vietnam War Era (Seraphim Editions, 2008). The boogie bounces between pain and parody as she makes fun of her own erudition, her scholarly work at Simon Fraser University, with the outrageous image of:
      My thesis grows pregnant with itself,
      swells to 300 pages, mysterious,
      white, like Moby Dick.
   Here again voices mingle: the oh-so-serious student, the mildly mocking adult and, as always, the archetypal image and power of literary and symbolic art.
   Another voice from this section of the book is that of Mary Magdalene who is shown as a kind of New Testament sister to the trio of Deo, Kore and Susan.  There are also some interesting parallels here with texts by a British historian and a Canadian poet. Susan's “The Gospel of Mary Magdalene” (originally published in the anthology Arms Like Ladders: the Eloquent She, Poems from the Feminist Caucus (League of Canadian Poets, 2007), explores different aspects of the “woman of intimacies” who, like her relative Persephone (“Persephone Sits in the Silence”), “spoke in silence, an interior speaking.”
   These likenesses present not so much a person as a newly realized approach to the divine that Lynn Picknett examines as “The Magdalene Alternative” in The Secret History of Mary Magdalene: Christianity’s Hidden Goddess (Constable & Robinson, 2003). The approach also leads to and eventually becomes an identity by a retelling of certain of the gospel stories; or, as Katerina Vaughan Fretwell puts it in “The Whole Soul” sequence of her Angelic Scintillations (Innana Publications, 2011), by “stepping in and out of myth” (“Prophetic Fantasy”). Susan’s complementary approach wittily mixes the human and divine aspects of “this particular Mary” until “you could not say . . . who the Christ and who not the Christ” (“Magdalene”).
   The book continues to examine itself, to wonder and wander between the seen and the seer. It is in an important way a kind of artistic exegesis – a detailed reaction to this mix of stories that takes the surface narrative (descent, ascent, etc.) to be the core of unique meaning that is exposed and explored by means of ever new and ever more relevant parallels.
   The  book is thus not so much a modern version of an ancient text or telling, but rather a complementary retelling that works both from and by means of the earlier/later/always contemporary myth, parable and multiple word picture.*

* A review emphasizing contemporary culture in the book, titled “A Modern Myth,” by Michael W. Higgins, vice-president for mission and Catholic identity at Sacred Heart University, Fairfield, Conn., came out in Salon Books (Saturday, April 7, 2012).