Sappho: One Hundred Lyrics (version 2)

The greatest lyric poet of antiquity wrote in fire and honey, and then the centuries swallowed almost everything. Sappho of Lesbos, whom the Greeks called "the tenth muse," left behind only two complete poems and a handful of shattered fragments, the rest lost to time, accident, and the moralizers who burned her verses. Bliss Carman's collection is an act of imaginative reclamation: he reconstructs what those hundred missing lyrics might have sounded like, placing himself in the myrtle groves of Mitylene where Sappho once sang of desire and the goddess who drove poets to madness. These are poems of longing, of beauty too sharp to bear, of love as religious experience. Carman writes in the shadow of the impossible, attempting to give voice to the voice that Robert Graves called "the white goddess" of poetic inspiration. For readers who grieve lost literature, who feel the pull of the ancient world, or who simply want to hear what Sappho's voice might have sounded like in its full fury and tenderness.