Perhaps you’ve heard of Persephone. Hers is an apt story right about now, as we head into December.
In Greek mythology, Persephone was the daughter of Zeus, the king of all the gods, and Demeter, the goddess of the harvest. One day while out picking flowers, Persephone was abducted by Hades, the king of the underworld. Demeter went into such mourning that all crops stopped growing and the earth entered a cold, barren time (sound familiar?).
Zeus rallied to get her back but in the meantime, Hades convinced Persephone to eat a few pomegranate seeds. According to the Fates, anyone who eats or drinks of the fruits of the underworld must stay there forever. (Remember this next time you’re in hell.) A deal was finally brokered whereby Persephone was sent back to earth but had to return to the underworld for the same number of months as seeds she’d eaten. (In some versions of the story, three, in others, six.)
Poet Hannah Fries, whose collection, “Little Terrarium,” was recently published by Hedgerow Books, the poetry imprint of Levellers Press in Amherst, draws from the Persephone myth in her poem, “Pomegranate.”
“I love to weave together nature and science with Biblical and mythological stories and see how those things rub up against each other,” Fries says. “I’ve always enjoyed interdisciplinary studies, and I think it’s a lot more exciting than committing to only one way of being in the world.”
You can see this weaving at work in many of Fries’ poems.
In its relatively few lines, “Pomegranate,” reprinted here, manages to evoke not only the mythological world but also the political reality of the war-torn regions where the fruit grows.
The Latin roots of the word mean “many-seeded apple,” Fries explains. And “grenade” is the French word for pomegranate.
“The pomegranate bursts apart into many seeds, which is what gave the grenade its name,” she says. “And the fact that it’s native to Iran and cultivated widely in the Middle East, which has seen so much violence and war — those things came together to inspire the poem.”
Fries lives in Sandisfield and works as an editor at Storey Publishing in North Adams. She’s published widely in literary journals, including “The Massachusetts Review,” MassPoetry.org and “upstreet.”
“Little Terrarium” contains three sections, including a middle section of poems written in response to paintings by 19th century American painter Winslow Homer. The full-color reproductions print beautifully on the book’s heavy paper.
Homer was a painter she grew up admiring, Fries says. Her parents had a reproduction of one his paintings in their home. And summers spent on the Maine coast spurred a lifetime love of the sea that drew her to his marine landscapes, and to an appreciation of the difficulty of painting the ocean.
In “West Point, Prout’s Neck, Maine,” Fries writes of a wave: … arched back like a broken wrist, tethered/ by a brush to its shattering and wild against/ last light, bursting into sculpture, impossibly/ paused …
Fries says, that as she was assembling the collection, she found it helpful to spread all the poems she had out on the floor.
“When you write one poem at a time, you don’t necessarily see the threads, or the themes, that are linking them,” she says.
One theme she discovered was the exploration of different versions of the feminine voice.
“Like Noah’s wife, who doesn’t have a name otherwise, at least in the Hebrew bible, or Mary, who is so over-characterized,” Fries says. “Or Pygmalion’s girl, who is a statue, created.”
Fries found herself drawn to “imagining a voice for each of these women of mythology whose voices seem to have been buried.”
No priest, no holy man ever expected it would take a woman who bleeds, Fries’ Mary says. I tow them behind me.
Fries will be reading Friday, Dec. 9, at 5:30 p.m. at The Bookstore, 11 Housatonic St. in Lenox. Call 413-637-3390 or visit:
www.bookstoreinlenox.com
Ask for “Little Terrarium” at local bookstores, or find it at Collective Copies stores in Amherst and Florence. You can also purchase the book at: www.hedgerowpress.com
You can find out more about Fries and read more of her poems at:
www.hannahfries.com
Trish Crapo is a writer and photographer who lives in Leyden. She is always looking for poets, writers and artists to interview for her columns. She can be reached at tcrapo@mac.com