Review of Odysseus' Daughter by Cammy Thomas

 

Cammy Thomas, Odysseus’ Daughter. Parkman Press. 2023. 20pp. $18.00

Review by Ruth Hoberman

Amid summer heat and ghastly newspaper headlines, Cammy Thomas’s Odysseus’ Daughter blows in like a brisk, briny sea breeze. Nineteen poems beautifully printed, with a gatefold blue-gray cover bearing an elegant line drawing of Athena by the poet’s brother: the book is a pleasure to hold in your hands. And the poems make those familiar Odyssean characters come alive yet again: Penelope, Nausicaa, Cyclops, the sea nymph Leucothea, Argos, and others are transformed by Thomas’s precise, musical language into new guises. Anyone who has taught the Odyssey repeatedly—as Thomas has—knows how beautifully it opens up conversations about love, family, heroism, mortality, gender politics, and community. Thomas’s poems touch on many of these themes but what struck me most was their repeated return to the uncanny: the sense that on some level we are unfamiliar to ourselves, shot through with contradictory yearnings as we negotiate what she calls in one poem the “shifting voids of the waves.”

A Boston-area poet, Thomas taught literature and creative writing for many years (including fourteen years of teaching the Odyssey) and now lives in Bolton, Massachusetts. Odysseus’ Daughter is her fourth book.

Homer’s Odysseus, of course, had no daughter; men in his family bore single sons. I take the title poem’s imagined daughter to be the poet, heir to Odysseus’s prowess not in war, but with words: “my boat has nothing of mast or crew,” Thomas writes. “I stand under the bow of heaven/words locked in my throat.” Meanwhile, the world does what it will: the boat floats on an unfathomable sea, and “gods hang above decks.” Greek gods are notoriously imperfect, much like the humans in whose lives they interfere. The speakers in these poems live in an eerie, unmanageable world that mirrors their own unwieldy desires.

So Penelope is neither the standard sad sack, weeping and sleeping her life away, nor is she the clever, idealized wife. She’s just human—“weary now,” getting fed up. Yes, she cleverly manipulate the suitors with her ruse of weaving and unweaving her father-in-law’s shroud, teasing them “into limbo/as they feast on dwindled flocks.” But she also feels something herself:

Now I dream of the handsome one,

imagine his soft lips on mine,

shame myself in morning light.

Penelope’s desires make sense in human terms—twenty years of celibacy! But they also make sense in Homeric terms, as an example of homophrosyne—the “like-mindedness” of Odysseus and his wife.

“Sea Nymph Leucothea” is another poem about complicated desires. As a former human, Leucothea is pained by Odysseus’s fear when she intervenes to save him from drowning. “In his face/I see—I’m no longer human”:

Still, he takes the scarf, and it scares

the water calm. I sink back into the cold

foreign gloom that’s now my home,

turn, swim down.

The modulations in vowel sounds are beautiful and evocative. How sad, we think, that poor Leucothea is condemned to such gloom. And then remember that she has solace of being immortal.

On the facing page Odysseus is human and near drowning: “His arms can’t pull through the chop,/mouth choked with salt, a ring of jagged/rocks clanging as he goes down.” Between sound and rhythm, I can just about feel the whitecaps splashing into my mouth, cutting off breath. And then Leucothea-as-bird offers a scarf as she transforms into nymph. No wonder Odysseus is scared as he “pumps his legs/against whatever glides beneath.”

“Whatever glides beneath”: the sea in these poems—as in Homer—is the ultimate undoing of human identity: unknowable, threatening us with oblivion, undoing our efforts at control. Its apotheosis comes in the final poem of Part 1, “Facing Scylla,” a virtuosic rendition of seawater sloshing and whirling, drowning syntax along with Odysseus’ remaining crew members. Words repeat, return with varying meanings, rhyme, almost rhyme; body parts, boat parts, sky and sea churn chaotically:

We row the foam we sense the mouth

It opens in a moment smoked

Sea foam smokes the glass we row

The mast the past come floating on the foam

While Part 1 adheres closely to Homer, the eight poems in Part 2 move into the modern world. We’re still in the hands of forces we can’t control (whether we call them gods or not) but without Odysseus’s resources to help us through. In “Not Your Wit I Want,” the speaker mourns, “She’s got cancer/and I can’t do a thing.” Brawn and wit won’t help, only “toxic drugs and scalpels.” But still the speaker yearns for the “nose-thumbing backtalk” with which

Odysseus faced death. “Save us Odysseus,” the speaker concludes: “you/and the iron-helmeted goddess,/give us ringing words that force/the invisible monster to its knees.”

Feminist poets in recasting Homer have often elevated Penelope, Circe and Kalypso at Odysseus’ expense. Thomas’s take is surprisingly sympathetic, emphasizing Odysseus’ vulnerability. Even as he rapes a nameless woman taken in a raid, he seems a little lost, “her tears/rough ropes/twisting my heart.” But in Part 2, through the imagined figures of Odysseus’ daughter, granddaughter, and sister (who, unlike her brother, wouldn’t “pillage a town for fun,”) Thomas begins to offer an alternative to Odyssean values. The book’s final poem is its least Homeric, positing a benevolent Zeus horrified by what we’ve made of the world. Reimagining Auden’s “Shield of Achilles,” Thomas has Zeus contrast the world he’d planned—“a simple favored place,/with greenery that shaded all from pain” and “no faceless governments that cannot feel”—with contemporary actualities; much as Auden contrasts the peaceful world that Thetis expected to see on her son’s shield, with the totalitarian nightmare Hephaestos has actually wrought there. But here I’ve come full circle, back to heat waves and ghastly headlines. “Save us Odysseus,” I’m tempted to say: “you/and the iron-helmeted goddess,/give us ringing words that force/the invisible monster to its knees.”