The titular bird of Rekdal’s book is based on the story of Philomela, a woman who had her tongue cut off after she was raped by her brother-in-law-a woman literally rendered speechless by her trauma. While Rekdal often reworks Ovid in the third person, there are two pivotal sequences in which she circumscribes herself, and her body, within mythology’s twin traditions of assault and transformation. In Ovid, Io is constantly stung by a gadfly in Rekdal’s retelling, the allusion is quietly echoed in the “constant pain, a dim prickling” that afflicts the paralyzed legs of the pastry chef. The connections between these modern characters and their mythological equivalents are subtle, sometimes tenuous, but always present.

Rekdal deftly updates a half dozen or so of Ovid’s myths, casting off any pretense of antiquity, and plunging these figures straight into our times: “Tiresias” is about a mother undergoing chemotherapy for breast cancer whose daughter has transitioned and become her son “Io” is about the sexual frustrations of a lesbian pastry chef who has become a quadriplegic after being hit by a car on her bike “Pasiphae” is about a woman whose grief over her husband’s death manifests as an obsessive relationship with the dead man’s dog. But instead of writing persona poems in Nightingale, Rekdal almost always approaches her mythological figures in the third person, leveraging that distance to create character studies in which the bridge from trauma to transformation is rendered with shattering objectivity. As with her previous collection, Imaginary Vessels, Rekdal remains interested in acts of embodiment, the perennial power of speaking through vacated vessels, breathing life into personae. In The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony, a book whose project of mapping out a history of the myths of antiquity can be seen as a modern-day counterpart to Ovid’s Metamorphoses, classicist Roberto Calasso explains that from a primeval sexual assault, that of Io, “history itself was born: the abduction of Helen, the Trojan War, and before that, the Argonauts’ expedition and the abduction of Medea-all are links in the same chain.” It’s not too difficult to feel, in 2020, that selfsame chain of linkages.Įnter Nightingale, Paisley Rekdal’s sixth collection of poetry, a book that recasts mythological figures from The Metamorphoses for the #MeToo era. The enduring power of mythological figures lies in their ability to echo, to repeat with variation, to pass a tragic baton down generations. So much classical mythology can be mapped out as an ever-forking family tree of rape and change, assault and transformation. – Roberto Calasso, from The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony

“Her story too was one of abduction and metamorphosis.”

Intimate by Paisley Rekdal