The Antigone Poems
by Marie Slaight and Terrence Tasker
Altaire, 2014
The Antigone Poems is a collaborative work, made up of poetry by Marie Slaight and drawings by Terrence Tasker. Created in the 1970s when the writer and artist were living in Montreal and Toronto, and published in 2014, it is an attractively produced book. The drawings, most depicting faces like tragic masks, divide the five chapters. These images are archaic and chthonic in mood, free from any twee classicising, and match well the equally chthonic mood of the poetry. Most of the poems are brief, suggesting fragments of some larger lost work. Such world as they sketch is made out of primary things: sun, blood, bones.
The book presents itself, in the words of the blurb, as ‘an intensely personal invocation of the ancient Greek tragedy’. The less definite ‘invocation’ rather than ‘retelling’ is a wise choice, though the latter term does appear in the promotional material. These poems are rather a lyric engagement with the story, which really requires its readers to know the narrative ahead of time. This is itself an ancient practice, found for instance in some tragic lyric. The blurb’s reference to ‘the ancient Greek tragedy’ suggests Sophocles’ Antigone, though other plays also featured Oedipus’s daughter (among extant tragedies: Sophocles’s Oedipus at Colonus, Euripides’s Phoenissae). There is a decided theatricality to this book: not only the choice of a character primarily associated with drama and the style of the art-works, but the monologue style of the poems suggest a character performing herself.
To Koskino 