Description
Book SynopsisIn New Songs for Orpheus, John Reibetanz updates Ovid’s poetry. His words showed him to be a person of deep empathy for natural, animal, and human worlds, and Reibetanz posits that Ovid would be eager to take account of all that we have learned about them in the past two thousand years.
Trade Review“With these remarkable poems, John Reibetanz brings an ecopoetic sensibility sensibility to Ovid’s Myths of Metamorphosis, celebrating the “true metamorphosis” that occurs everywhere in the natural world, independent of the malign whims of gods and the selfish designs of humans. Working playfully, and playfully working, rich with music and wit, these poems extend our understanding of deep change. As usual with Reibetanz, imaginative reach blends with probing intelligence. Ovid supplies an ancient springboard for a poetic investigation of transformation that – given our circumstances – could not be more timely.” Don Mackay
“What delight! John Reibetanz elegantly updates Ovid in poems that reach beyond encounters between gods and mortals to haul the more-than-human world to our attention. Here’s Orpheus listening “[f]or a change … / to the other / musicians” as he sinks into and through grief’s underworld where he “picks up his lyre again / and sings the song of breath … “ From these depths Orpheus sings the world, and the world sings back with specifics of plumage and blossom, feather and stone, flight and appetite — details brilliant and till now hardly noticed. Here are songs that bear witness to the matter we are and its ongoingness: “… everything alive is borne / on a river of matter / changing from one identity / to another …” Fluent, riverine, rife with mortality and mutability, Reibetanz’s poems tumble, shift, flow, ring changes, while time expands and contracts and expands again. If Ovid is the spring from which these songs rise, the Tao is the deeper current they ride.” Maureen Scott Harris
“Reibetanz takes moments from Metamorphoses and creates rich natural worlds around them, often linking the power of myth with the power of animals.” Quill & Quire
"This brilliant and vibrant collection draws us into the old and makes it new, singing to us to find our empathy with nature before that vibrancy of the earth is lost by our own doing." Montreal Review of Books
