Jean Gallagher's 2005 FIELD Poetry Prize-winning Stubborn, as Mark Jarman wrote, "shows us how it feels for the human and the holy to interact." Now, in Start, she enters the world of classical myth to explore the meanings of motherhood, loss, grief, and renewal. Her brilliant concision and riveting music bring the ancient narrative sharply into the present, transforming it to a vision that feels thrillingly contemporary and personal.
"Jean Gallagher plunges us into the mystery-shrouded chthonic rites of Demeter and Persephone in a stunning postmodern Homeric hymn, stepping into the company of other reinventors of the ancient myths like H.D., Anne Carson, and Louise Gluck. In her haunting, spare, mystical enactments of ancient rites of loss, descent into the earth and underearth, and ecstatic return, she leaves readers like one of the initiates at Eleusis who 'came out of the mystery hall feeling like a stranger to myself.' We're ungrounded by these poems, cast among the mysteries and ecstacies: reading Start, I felt—as Gallagher's Persephone herself says—'the ground I never knew / could open did.'"