Stephanie Pope

MP Review:

Stephanie Pope, Like A Woman Falling

Reviewed by Sandy McKinney

Like A Woman Falling: Selected Poems

Mythic Artist Press

ISBN: 0-9753824-0-3 $19.99

 

Like A Woman Falling

On the first few tries, I had a hard time getting into this book. Let's face it, my background in reading, writing, and critiquing poetry was strongly shaped by Academic influences. I soon discovered that if I wanted to know what these poems were about and why, I was going to have to drop that prejudice and approach these radically experimental poems with a new eye.

Pope appears to regard her literary work as only one aspect of her explorations into what she calls "mythopoesis." Strongly feminist in her approach to both mythology and society, this poet steps into the danger zones of sexuality, psychology, and taboo secure in her own power and her willingness to fall, to flounder, and to fail in her search for a personal truth that will conform to the eternal truths inherent in every mythology. Not content to rest in the traditional study of Greek and Roman mythology, she finds a compelling mythos in the structure of trees, in the way clouds move in the sky, even in the Wonderland of Alice, the basis for a whole series of poems, such as "down a rabbit hole" where the reader is asked:

. . . . in the nonsense can you

accept not knowing why? Did you ever

drive yourself down so hard that you

got to the bottom of something?

Although there is rarely any traditional structure, the poems are held together by leaps of the imagination and playful rhyming, as in:

How many more are there like me

And, ever more importantly

What becomes of the fallen

In bodies that do not fall

Upon what foundation are

They buoyed and girled

I have been hurled

Like a severed head falling

Into a consciousness again

With a liberated fate from

Fashionable pathologies of time

These are poems not about women, but about Woman, in all her grit and glory. One of the delights of this collection is discovering the kind of wry and only shallowly buried wit that can begin a book with "Ode to Artemis," who

Wooed in us a veneration of light

Before -- where in her great self-expression

Forming out of itself kindness and creation

She became a Maiden-sort-of-Mother -- so

. . . while still hidden

Such that wherever in us

Her spiritflesh she bred

There nascent, sprang

The breadrites of all generations

  --Downfended

Who though they may not remember

Build yet her flesh into their own

and end with "Pater Nostre." Reading the first strophe:

In the name of the father

We stayed little and life stayed little

and the truth stayed hidden and men

stayed holy

can one fail to remember where it all began?

With a rich and varied background in teaching, creative writing, and psychology, Pope earned her MA in Mythological Studies, with a special emphasis in Depth Psychology from Pacifica Graduate Institute. She lives with her family in Arizona, where she works and publishes as a writer and poet on-line at MYTHoPOETRY.

© Reviewed by Sandy McKinney This review first published with Alsop Review

 

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About the Author: Stephanie has been writing poetry since she learned to write. Her work explores the boundaries of myth and poetry en poieses or mythopoieses. She is a member of the artist consortium, Mythic Artist. Like A Woman Falling is Stephanie's first published work.

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