Hephaestus, Persephone at Enna, and Sappho in Leucadia

Three poems, three portraits of love consumed by sorrow. Hephaestus, the lame god of fire and forge, releases Aphrodite into the arms of Ares, his love too wounded and too generous to demand her return. Persephone, queen of the Underworld, speaks from the meadow at Enna where she was abducted, caught between the dead and the living, between the pomegranate's bitter seed and the sunlight she can never fully reclaim. And Sappho, the tenth muse of Lesbos, stands on the white cliffs of Leucadia, her poetry of desire having failed her, facing the sea that has taken so many who loved beyond bearing. Stringer writes in a lush, early twentieth-century romantic style, letting these ancient figures voice the specific anguish of unreciprocated love, of sacrifice that costs everything, of joy shadowed by its own impermanence. The collection moves through Greek mythology like a visitor to a house of ghosts, finding in these immortal figures the most human of sorrows.