Odysseus’ Daughter by Cammy Thomas
Parkman Press, 2023
The first poem of the slim chapbook Odysseus’ Daughter hints at the themes that glance through its poems. In the following pages, delicately drawn miniatures return to motifs first raised in “Laurel”:
fixed on forever
toward you my would-be lover
your desires and mine
you my tempter and disaster
It seems almost impossible to consider The Odyssey, Western literature’s most famous paean to a man taking the long way home from work, without reflecting on how time impacts desires and disasters. The first poem of this collection does so in Penelope’s long-waiting voice. As the famously raucous suitors gather in the anterooms, Penelope thinks
Once I would have fought them,
trained my son to fight them, planned
mayhem in the desert of my bedroom.But weary now, I twist the subtle
thread
Time has softened her, and it shows how different she is from her husband, who never loses that taste for mayhem. In discarding that choice for herself and for her son, Penelope sets herself apart, and Thomas signals that the first section of the chapbook will highlight how those in Odysseus’ orbit are defined in opposition to him. These poems offer fleeting glimpses of characters abandoned in Odysseus’ wake, like the sea nymph, Leucothea. In her eponymous poem, Leucothea’s memory of life as a “human girl” prompts her to rescue the shipwrecked hero, but the very next poem strips that humanity. In Odysseus’ eyes, she is only a “white creature” despite her compassion.
Even the Cyclops seems more human than Odysseus, his blinding crueler because Odysseus can see “two worlds” with his two eyes:
one ram, one olive tree.
If there are two for you,
there must always be first
one—then the other—
one gate of horn
through which true dreams come,
and one of ivory—dreams never to be.
In the second section of the chapbook, The Odyssey’s symbology entwines with contemporary life, spawning poems that journey through wonder and fear. A father like Odysseus, known best by his dog. A daughter becalmed, caught in wordless pain. The poems turn around an ominous something, a dark Charybdis finally disclosed:
She’s got cancer
and I can’t do a thing—
she needs toxic drugs and scalpels
that starve and carve the coiling cells away.It’s not your brawn I want,
brave Odysseus, it’s that daring,
even when you wake to disaster,
it’s that brave nose-thumbing backtalk
Odysseus, for all his faults, offers the powerless speaker an image to cling to, a strength that goes beyond brawn. She seeks his boldness as he faces disaster again and again, forever shipwrecked and righted until he reaches the shores of his good home. Thomas offers no such satisfactory ending. The cancer, presumably, remains. Then again, so does the daring—and this chapbook shows that a hero’s daring is not confined to the hero alone.
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Elizabeth Sylvia’s second collection, Scythe (2026), is forthcoming from River River Books. Her first collection, None But Witches (2022), won the Three Mile Harbor Book Award. Elizabeth was the winner of the 2023 riverSedge Poetry Prize and has received fellowships from the West Chester Poetry Center and the Longleaf Writers’ Conference.