Sappho's Gymnasium

Written as if by two students of Sappho in ancient times, fragments of whose work have survived, these poems offer brief, mysterious glimpses of a world beyond our ordinary reach. That world is not, however, the Lesbos of late 7th-early-6th-century B.C., but the contemporary mind, littered with broken pieces of information and language, and attenuated connections between sexuality, spirituality, poetry, feminism, metaphysics and the stones, birds, flowers, leaves, herbs and light of the actual, elusive here and now. Begley is a poet and a classicist. Broumas (Perpetua) is the author of three volumes of poetry based on the oral tradition of ancient and modern Greek poetry, and is the translator of three volumes by the surrealist Greek poet Odysseas Elytis; she has collaborated previously with poet Jane Miller (Black Holes, Black Stockings). This new collaboration is a daring extension of that earlier work. The poems read like translations from a language of ourselves that we can only begin to decipher. Their fragmentation embodies the human condition of brokenness, mortality and limitation. Yet the combined voice of the two poets also offers a prayer for healing, a hymn to the possibility of wholeness through love, through a difficult faith, and through poetry. (Nov.)