ICARUS FFFFFALLING collaborates with Ovid's METAMORPHOSES, and with Retallack's students at Bard College "who when asked to go out and photograph Icarus falling found him everywhere." Icarus: boy wonder who won't follow Daddy's advice and stick to the middle way; son who by sacrificing himself covers up his father's jealousy and murder (look up the myth of Daedalus and Talos); Leonardo/Daedalus the artist building machines of destruction; "Dead-o-Lust founder of Socrates circular line"--but this is too simple a reading already. Make it messier: "a boy rejoicing in bold flight deserts his leader why this desire for open sky in species w/out wings"--not easy to refuse this. And question poetry itself: "have you noticed that poetry was one of the noble gases ripening the pomegranate never a cantaloupe or banana"--the "noble gases" are those that don't mix with others in chemical compounds. They remain pure--"and the grief remains buried in the obscurity of the Latin" as if it were one of Gibbon's chastely quoted Roman obscenities--"dis pathetic Roman tic nihil est how to: have hi-flyin ideas under fallen yellow arches." The theme of the pharmakos runs through all the myths of Daedalus and his kin; drug, poison, healing medicine, and also scapegoat, the pharmakos in ancient Greek ritual was thrown over a cliff into the sea, but provided with wings that might break his fall and let him live, though in perpetual exile. Take note: Retallack's not dealing here (or elsewhere) in the sort of cozily Jungian archetypes this might suggest; the languages she weaves together are as complex as the twenty-five or so centuries of painful aspiration and destruction she has gathered in this short poem.--Charlotte Pressler
This review originally appeared in TapRoot Reviews #5,
Contact the editor, luigi-bob drake, at Burning Press
Copyright Burning Press 1994, 1996.