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The Islands Project: Poems for Sappho
The Islands Poems For Sappho is a book-length collection of poems intended as a conversation with and investigation of the life of Sappho as can be imagined from her work and historical circumstances. The poems attempt a meeting between a contemporary woman poet and one from antiquity, both of them adrift in time. What can a lesbian poet know of her supposed progenitor? If Sappho is only fragments, is not a lesbian tradition in poetry the same, or does it only feel that way? The Islands Project investigates these questions and deals, at the same time, with the death of the poet’s mother.
- GenresPoetry
120 pages, Paperback
First published February 15, 2007
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November 1, 2020
these poems are gorgeous. i love healy's writing style and sense of humor, and she does a great job of drawing the beautiful out of an everyday scenario or landscape. the biggest selling point for me (as a lesbian classicist) was of course the engagement with sappho, and i was not disappointed. healy charts a relationship to sappho that is at once one of deep kinship across time (e.g., "My Mothers," "Not Disappearing") while embracing the fragmentary nature of the sapphic corpus as we have it (e.g., "I Know the Word is Figment, but I Think 'Fragment'"). i was really pleased to see that one of these poems ("A Text of Broken Texts") glosses page dubois' scholarship arguing for an aesthetic of the sapphic fragment -- and does dubois' academic argument justice in poetic form. i found most personally resonant those poems that dealt with the scorn often directed at queer women who feel a connection to sappho, that our sense of commonality (and specifically shared experience as women who love and desire other women) is doing some disservice to her. in "Audacious," healy answers the question "How dare I speak / for Sappho?" provocatively: "How do you know what / Jesus meant except / feeling the words / pierce your heart, / align with your breath?" the issue is taken up again in "How Much Can I Have of Sappho?", a poem in four parts. its opening alone was like balm for my soul:
"Which fragment gets to be mine
and what empty room
where you imagine I possess her
at last? where i wrap her
in an embrace?
Sad and limited, that view,
when I intuit she and I would be rivals
with our eye on the same woman."
i think what i appreciate most about this passage, and many of the other poems in this collection, is that healy doesn't resort to traditionally academic forms of 'evidence' (close readings of the greek, appealing to the authority of biographers, etc.) to justify her experiences of reading and writing for/about/with sappho. she mostly focuses on a somewhat ineffable sense of recognition, a link you might feel in your bones. it's just this kind of affective identification that some scholars (in my experience) tend to ridicule or dismiss, mostly when expressed by people they can assume are queer women, as driven by emotion over text -- despite the fact that, in many of sappho's poems, it requires considerably more acrobatics to elicit a 'heterosexual' reading from the text in front of us. in the quote above, healy actually reveals this 'objective,' 'textually-based' stance for what it is, at least equally motivated by (homophobic, misogynist) ideology and the affective responses it triggers. the idea that a reader of sappho who claims kinship with her on the grounds of a similar orientation towards gender and sexuality should actually be angling to "possess her" is hardly fair or objective. healy's poem brings out the sexual dynamics implicit in this assumption, but one could argue that they were already lying beneath the surface of a discourse that cannot conceive of queer women's 'claims' on sappho as anything but the kind of sexualized predation that many homophobes imagine constitutes queer women's (especially lesbian) identity. from another perspective, this kind of discourse does its own disservice to sappho, conceiving of her (via metonymic extrapolation from her poetry) as a sort of damsel in distress who needs to be rescued from the corrupting influence of queer readers, rather than, as healy reminds us, a woman who, in her poetry, is explicit about her own attraction and desire for other women.
anyway long story short, do read this!! beautiful poetry, beautiful reflections on queer womanhood and literary kinship!
"Which fragment gets to be mine
and what empty room
where you imagine I possess her
at last? where i wrap her
in an embrace?
Sad and limited, that view,
when I intuit she and I would be rivals
with our eye on the same woman."
i think what i appreciate most about this passage, and many of the other poems in this collection, is that healy doesn't resort to traditionally academic forms of 'evidence' (close readings of the greek, appealing to the authority of biographers, etc.) to justify her experiences of reading and writing for/about/with sappho. she mostly focuses on a somewhat ineffable sense of recognition, a link you might feel in your bones. it's just this kind of affective identification that some scholars (in my experience) tend to ridicule or dismiss, mostly when expressed by people they can assume are queer women, as driven by emotion over text -- despite the fact that, in many of sappho's poems, it requires considerably more acrobatics to elicit a 'heterosexual' reading from the text in front of us. in the quote above, healy actually reveals this 'objective,' 'textually-based' stance for what it is, at least equally motivated by (homophobic, misogynist) ideology and the affective responses it triggers. the idea that a reader of sappho who claims kinship with her on the grounds of a similar orientation towards gender and sexuality should actually be angling to "possess her" is hardly fair or objective. healy's poem brings out the sexual dynamics implicit in this assumption, but one could argue that they were already lying beneath the surface of a discourse that cannot conceive of queer women's 'claims' on sappho as anything but the kind of sexualized predation that many homophobes imagine constitutes queer women's (especially lesbian) identity. from another perspective, this kind of discourse does its own disservice to sappho, conceiving of her (via metonymic extrapolation from her poetry) as a sort of damsel in distress who needs to be rescued from the corrupting influence of queer readers, rather than, as healy reminds us, a woman who, in her poetry, is explicit about her own attraction and desire for other women.
anyway long story short, do read this!! beautiful poetry, beautiful reflections on queer womanhood and literary kinship!
January 23, 2013
From the new poet laureate of Los Angeles, a splendid blend of the mythic, the elegiac, and the erotic. An homage to the muse of Lesbian poetry in all its senses and to the poet's late mother.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews