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list price: $17.95
edition:Paperback
also available: eBook
category: Poetry
published: Sep 2009
ISBN:9780864925381
publisher: Goose Lane Editions

Athena Becomes a Swallow and Other Voices from The Odyssey

by Brent MacLaine

tagged: canadian
Description

Brent MacLaine's elegant, capacious, and finely crafted fourth collection, Athena Becomes a Swallow, contains twenty-seven monologues spoken by characters that appear in Homer's The Odyssey. These are not the voices of the major players, but the voices of the minor characters who received scant attention in the original. Here they are allowed to have their say about the events that swirl around them, providing a new persepctive and showing how the shine of the gods also falls on the common folk.

About the Author
Brent MacLaine is Professor Emeritus and a 3M Teaching Fellow in the Department of English at UPEI. He grew up in the rural community of Rice Point, PEI, to which he returned after teaching at universities in Vancouver, China, and Singapore. In addition to numerous academic articles on modern literature, he has published four volumes of poetry. His awards for poetry include a League of Canadian Poets prize, the Prince Edward Island Book Award, and the Atlantic Poetry Prize.
Editorial Reviews

"'My imprint keeps. I shall be transformed,' says the scribe in one of these vivid monologues. MacLaine's own imprint keeps, and we are transformed — enchanged by rhythms that catch the throat-sounds of unsung heroes, and by luminous visions seen through their eyes, as his art turns ‘rounded underwater stones to gold.'"

— John Reibetanz

"Exploring the nooks and crannies of Homer's great epic poem, Brent MacLaine casts a kind of anti-Circean spell, granting a deeper humanity, a lyric consciousness, to figures half-hidden in shadow, fate-gripped. As the monologues build, this cadenced talk of laundry maid or beggar or musician becomes a meditation on poetry itself."

— Mary Dalton

"A classic in terms of psychological depth, creativity, style, angle, and theme... It's rare that one reads a 90-page collection of poems filled with so much craft, wit, and brilliance."

— <i>Arc Poetry Magazine</i>
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