July 08, 2005

Suzy Zeus Gets Organized, Maggie Robbins

Light chick lit might as well be verse, since verse shows off imagery and zingers and what else does one read this stuff for? Robbins adds a discernible plot, with dating and religion and a bit of a nervous breakdown, but the fun is the rhythm and the rhyme:

Ancient Greeks, with nine to choose from,
sipped their ouzo, heard their muse.
Suzy wonders, was that real, or
was it maybe just the booze?
Suzy hears a thought. His roommate
isn't just his roommate, Suze.

Is it a trend? Is it a Movement? Another three of the books I've blogged in Poetry are this-sort-of-thing, especially The Beauty of the Husband; then two of them are antiquarian (The Emperor's Babe, The Penelopeia) where 'Zeus' in this title is oblique. Definitely a trend.

Of the Nine, none were devoted
To shopping, chocolate or shoes.

Later: That was too cheap a shot. I should have remembered one of the sweeter poems from the tenth muse:

I have no embroidered headband to give you, Cleis, such as I wore
and in my mother's day a purple ribbon was the height of fashion
but we were dark; a girl as fair as sunshine
should only wear flowers.

Fashion; wedding (?) worries; generational saga... it's not the plot that makes great literature.

The above is my memory of, almost certainly, Mary Barnard's translation of Sappho. Since Barnard mostly had memory-jogger-size scraps to translate, it's hard to quote her in proportions small enough to be definitely fair use...

Find in a Library from Worldcat

So wrote clew in Poetry.
And thus wrote others:
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