You know the myth of Persephone. She was stolen away from her mother Demeter, goddess of the harvest, and taken to the underworld. The sunshine goes with her, and that’s why we have fall, then winter. Demeter can bring her daughter back for part of the year, and during this time, when Persephone is reunited with her mother, everything blooms. This is spring, the season we are approaching now.
My favorite poetic retellings of this myth are Louise Glück’s Averno and What to Tip the Boatman? by Cleopatra Mathis. Now I have a favorite prose version. In Fruit of the Dead, Rachel Lyon sets the myth in modern-day New England. The book follows Cory from a summer camp to a remote, private island, while her mother searches for her. Here’s an example of the descriptive prose Lyon so beautifully deploys to bring her reader on this journey:
“The only sounds, here at the back of the island, are the rhythmic crashing of waves, buzz of insects, slow wicked laughter of gulls and susurrus of wind in the trees, which grow right up to the water’s edge, long black logs falling in and decomposing, reclaimed by weeds and creepers.”
Rachel Lyon creates a world of lush, poetic prose that feels at once modern and mythical, a kaleidoscope of sugar, sex, death, rape, and opioid addiction. Lyon writes:
“Lying on her back on the grass, she thinks the allure of the drug and the drinks and even of Rollo himself is like the allure of a cave full of diamonds, a glorious, luxurious, protected place she can crawl deep into, out of the moonlight, out of reality. The air may be stale in there, the light false, but it is beautiful and she is beautiful too, inside it—and completely, deliciously, fearfully alone.”
Lyon depicts the mother-daughter connection, the beating heart of the myth, by letting the mother and daughter characters tell their stories slightly differently. As she searches for her daughter, the mother must reflect back on her own upbringing: “My own childhood feels as dim as a horror film half watched long ago and now mostly forgotten…”
The chapter titles are themselves little poems. My favorite is the title of Chapter Nine: “And She Yet Beheld Earth and Starry Heaven, and the Strong-Flowing Sea Where Fishes Shoal, and Still Hoped to See Her Mother”. Rachel Lyon has crafted something new and wonderful from an ancient Greek myth. Read it.
Rena J. Mosteirin wrote Experiment 116 (Counterpath press, 2021), Half-Fabulous Whales (Little Dipper, 2019) and Nick Trail’s Thumb (Kore Press, 2008). She is the co-author of Moonbit (punctum books, 2019) an academic and poetic exploration of the Apollo 11 guidance computer code. Mosteirin is an editor at Bloodroot Literary Magazine, teaches creative writing workshops at Dartmouth College and owns Left Bank Books, a used bookstore in Hanover.