I’ve steered away from reading contemporary poetry for the last little while because, after a bit, it all becomes a bit about people overcoming the trauma of their past relationships but acknowledging they aren’t the same afterwards. While this is an important story, it’s sad to me that there is so little contemporary poetry at the moment that really embraces themes outside of that.

The reason why this collection grabbed me was the title. I was hoping, and expecting, something like Goddess of the Hunt, which is another poetry collection that features heavily a goddess from Greek myth, or even Wild Embers.

Instead of being purely focused on Aphrodite, this collection turned out to be a sort of conversation between Aphrodite and the poet, exploring the different things that they each had to say from their experiences of love, war and grievances in general. My favourite part was definitely looking back at the history of the goddess and seeing how that has been changed and cheapened to fit in with man’s definition of what it is to be feminine. I actually can’t overstate how much I loved that. It was such a strong way to begin this collection.

The downsides of this collection were mostly in the repetition of ‘I’ statements throughout. For most of it, this appeared like a way of separating the poet’s voice from Aphrodite’s, and at the end it was something that Aphrodite also adopted in her final section on war. I understand, I think, what this was trying to achieve. It was just a technique that didn’t work for me.

As is usual in a lot of these poetry collections, the list of trigger warnings are at the front and they include:

– body image
– sexual assault
– rape
– eating disorders
– queerphobia
– emotional abuse
– physical abuse