Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611

  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
New Songs for Orpheus

New Songs for Orpheus

Reibetanz, John

Paperback

Series: Hugh MacLennan Poetry

General Poetry

Currently unavailable to order

ISBN10: 0228016940
ISBN13: 9780228016946
Publisher: McGill-Queen's University Press
Published: Feb 28 2023
Pages: 150
Weight: 0.30
Height: 0.55 Width: 4.80 Depth: 7.40
Language: English

For a change Orpheus / listens to the other / musicians once the hum / of his lyre no longer / hangs like moss from branches / in the forest air

In New Songs for OrpheusJohn Reibetanz updates Ovid's poetry. Ovid's words showed him to be a person of deep empathy for natural, animal, and human worlds, and so Reibetanz posits that the Roman writer would likely be eager to take account of all that we have learned about them in the past two thousand years.

Ovid would be familiar with recent discoveries about the complex inner lives and societies of non-human animals, and about the intricate interrelationships sustained in forests. The poems in New Songs for Orpheus look at and listen to the real creatures into which Ovid's characters were transformed, acts viewed not as punishment or deprivation, but as a release into other intriguing forms of life. In the human realm, he might find a suitably cataclysmic counterpart to the Trojan War in the barbarities and sacrifices of World War II, or perhaps see an analogue to the Fall of Troy in the fall of the Two Towers in September 2001.

The songs Orpheus sings then transform into more contemporary shapes, as characters and incidents from the Canadian musical Come from Away - like those in Ovid's restored world after the flood - are celebrated in a reaffirmation of community after the divisive horrors of 9/11. In all these times and places, metamorphosis brings new meaning into a life, be it human, plant, or animal.

Also from

Reibetanz, John

View All

Also in

General Poetry

View All