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Fireflies at Absolute Zero
Fireflies at Absolute Zero is a map of a life, written in location and longing, its calligraphy the surreal moments between dream and waking. The poems are shaped by myth, the Gaelic poetic tradition, dream worlds, personal history, and the grey-green landscape of the Salish Sea. From snowfall in the Hoh rainforest to the sensuality of a lover's touch, the poems span decades of a life in motion, finally finding a home between the mountains and waters of the Pacific Northwest.
- GenresPoetry
150 pages, Paperback
First published October 31, 2012
24 people want to read
About the author
Erynn Rowan Laurie
10 books24 followersErynn Rowan Laurie is a professional madwoman who has been fascinated by Gaelic and other Celtic cultures for over two decades. Her occult interests started when she was just a kid and she's been doing astrology and tarot since about the age of 12. Poet, writer, feminist, musician, interfaith activist and disabled veteran, Erynn is one of the founding voices of the Celtic Reconstructionist Pagan movement and the author of Ogam: Weaving Word Wisdom.
Born in Rhode Island and raised in Connecticut and western Massachusetts, Erynn currently resides in western Washington, loving the mountains, forests, and water beyond all logic or reason. She enjoys hiking, backpacking, and camping when she's able, and records the minutiae of her daily life and her spiritual and political ramblings on her blog.
Blog: http://erynn999.livejournal.com
Born in Rhode Island and raised in Connecticut and western Massachusetts, Erynn currently resides in western Washington, loving the mountains, forests, and water beyond all logic or reason. She enjoys hiking, backpacking, and camping when she's able, and records the minutiae of her daily life and her spiritual and political ramblings on her blog.
Blog: http://erynn999.livejournal.com
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
May 27, 2014
From bisexual-books.tumblr.com
Fireflies at absolute zero by Erynn Rowan Laurie won the Bisexual Book Award for Poetry in 2013. You can read an excerpt at Hiraeth Press.
Fireflies at absolute zero is a beautiful and eclectic collection that will appeal to readers with a strong connection to world mythology.
The collection starts with a section of poems written in the style of ancient praise poetry, invoking various Gods and Goddesses and calling on them to support the author’s creative endeavors. While it makes sense to start with this section to hold together the rest of the book, it is easily the most difficult to read. Several of the deities invoked are esoteric. Descent is a good example; it describes the parts of yourself that you lose as you descend through the gates of the Mesopotamian Underworld, each guarded by a different arcane God. Even a Classical Studies professor may want to have Google open while they are reading.
Descent is followed by Gates, with a repetitive refrain did you go down/into the depths/ down/ below the stark brown waters\down\into mystery, ending with the arrival of Antinous. Historically, Antinous was the boyfriend of Roman Emperor Hadrian. After Antinous’ premature death, Hadrian instituted the worship of Antinous as a God, and he was frequently associated with Osiris, God of the Nile and death, and Bacchus, a Greek god of wine and mysteries. Death and mysteries both feature prominently throughout the praise poetry.
References to Antinous return in Hadrian’s Beard, about Hadrian’s wife and her extramarital girlfriends. Referring to her as a beard was strangely modern in a section otherwise influenced by religious praise poetry. Very little is known about Hadrian’s historical wife, Vibia Sabina, except that she had an affair with the historian Suetonius, and she was sometimes described as strong and independent. Re-imagining Vibia as having her own bisexual affairs with women was a nice detail.
The stories of ancient mythology establish a loose framework for the rest of the poetry, even as the imagery moves away from Gods and Goddess. Section two, Walking to Charlemont, is about as far as Laurie could get from ancient Gods and Goddess, full of the sea, maple sap, and anti-war protests in a Massachusetts coastal town. This section had one of my favorite poems, Digressions, about what the narrator will do when she is old, which really just turns into the rambling saga of all the stuff the narrator has done with her life in the meantime.
But Laurie frequently alludes to the Gods and Goddesses of the first section. In section two she refers to Shiva. In section three, The Night Sutra, she describes dreaming in terms of Inanna being stripped naked before descending into the Underworld in the Sumerian myth.
Section four, the Poetics of Desire, features erotic poems that sometimes seem to describe men, sometimes women, sometimes neither. One piece that stands out in the this section is the land between, which could describe a number of romantic situations, but which is written with a bisexual sensibility, and could easily describe a place between gender.
Laurie concludes her book with a poem invoking the same Gods and Goddesses from the first section, but the mythology of underworlds and afterlives is replaced with a humanistic message focusing on this life, which ultimately, is all we get.
Fireflies at absolute zero by Erynn Rowan Laurie won the Bisexual Book Award for Poetry in 2013. You can read an excerpt at Hiraeth Press.
Fireflies at absolute zero is a beautiful and eclectic collection that will appeal to readers with a strong connection to world mythology.
The collection starts with a section of poems written in the style of ancient praise poetry, invoking various Gods and Goddesses and calling on them to support the author’s creative endeavors. While it makes sense to start with this section to hold together the rest of the book, it is easily the most difficult to read. Several of the deities invoked are esoteric. Descent is a good example; it describes the parts of yourself that you lose as you descend through the gates of the Mesopotamian Underworld, each guarded by a different arcane God. Even a Classical Studies professor may want to have Google open while they are reading.
Descent is followed by Gates, with a repetitive refrain did you go down/into the depths/ down/ below the stark brown waters\down\into mystery, ending with the arrival of Antinous. Historically, Antinous was the boyfriend of Roman Emperor Hadrian. After Antinous’ premature death, Hadrian instituted the worship of Antinous as a God, and he was frequently associated with Osiris, God of the Nile and death, and Bacchus, a Greek god of wine and mysteries. Death and mysteries both feature prominently throughout the praise poetry.
References to Antinous return in Hadrian’s Beard, about Hadrian’s wife and her extramarital girlfriends. Referring to her as a beard was strangely modern in a section otherwise influenced by religious praise poetry. Very little is known about Hadrian’s historical wife, Vibia Sabina, except that she had an affair with the historian Suetonius, and she was sometimes described as strong and independent. Re-imagining Vibia as having her own bisexual affairs with women was a nice detail.
The stories of ancient mythology establish a loose framework for the rest of the poetry, even as the imagery moves away from Gods and Goddess. Section two, Walking to Charlemont, is about as far as Laurie could get from ancient Gods and Goddess, full of the sea, maple sap, and anti-war protests in a Massachusetts coastal town. This section had one of my favorite poems, Digressions, about what the narrator will do when she is old, which really just turns into the rambling saga of all the stuff the narrator has done with her life in the meantime.
But Laurie frequently alludes to the Gods and Goddesses of the first section. In section two she refers to Shiva. In section three, The Night Sutra, she describes dreaming in terms of Inanna being stripped naked before descending into the Underworld in the Sumerian myth.
Section four, the Poetics of Desire, features erotic poems that sometimes seem to describe men, sometimes women, sometimes neither. One piece that stands out in the this section is the land between, which could describe a number of romantic situations, but which is written with a bisexual sensibility, and could easily describe a place between gender.
Laurie concludes her book with a poem invoking the same Gods and Goddesses from the first section, but the mythology of underworlds and afterlives is replaced with a humanistic message focusing on this life, which ultimately, is all we get.
May 22, 2013
A collection of poems by a Seattle bi pagan priestess. The poems are well written and published previously in a number of journals, some of which are well-reputed or bi, over a period of fifteen years.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews