Poems for Camilla by Rachel Hadas (review)

The classical world has certainly agitated Rachel Hadas's work thus far; this is not simply evident in her translations of dramatic texts, such as Euripides's Helen (1997) or the verse of Tibullus and Seneca in Other Worlds Than This (1994), but is borne out in poems appearing across several collections, as early as Starting from Tory (1975) and, in recent years, The River of Forgetfulness (2006) and Questions in Vestibule (2016). A few months after the publication of her translations of Euripides's two Iphigenia plays, a new poetry collection, Poems for Camilla, further visits a classical perspective—this time through poems variously linked to the Aeneid. It may not be the first project seeking analogies and returns from ancient days—an example that comes to mind is Anne Carson's now five-year-old Red Doc> (2013)—and yet Hadas manages her own felt connections with a sense of urgency that is perhaps unique in such work, exercising the craft and control of a master along the way.

To an extent, Poems for Camilla surveys how our antecedents may assist us as we negotiate an especially dangerous present; and yet it also recognizes how often they, and their heroes, despaired in facing the same questions, with the same impossible answers. In this sense, considerations of public life abound; the current political situation, the Trumps, populists, and crowd-managers around the world are well witnessed, especially in "Painted Full of Tongues."

He has as many eyes, tongues, ears as feathers;flies, watches, talks and listens all at once,Incessantly. He's everywhere. He's growing.Broadcasting bulletins all dayfrom a high tower, filling people's mindswith bubbling streams of babblewhere true and false inextricably blend…

In the poem's last five lines, we hardly remain in doubt about the inspiration, modern and ancient: "Crouching at his tower, he pouts and glowers, / Angry and happy, happy to be angry, / And keeps on putting forth a froth of words / True and false mixed—but falsehood trumps the truth. / Virgil's Fama is female. Not this time." The inciting incident to Hadas's poetic approach, however, is demonstrably autobiographical: the birth of a granddaughter, and along with this, a sense of dedication to new life participating in the movement of the world. This fact shadows almost every line in this collection—and nowhere are the elements converging more clearly than in the opening, titular poem. It serves as both inception and summation of Hadas's concerns: named from the Aeneid book 7's warrior maiden, the granddaughter prompts Hadas to retread Virgil's story and characters, unearthing their ghosts in the current sociopolitical landscape. She now reads "… with the pleasure, / also with the dread, of recognition—/avid, reluctant. It was so familiar. / Haven't we all experienced this year, / that rage, insidious, insatiable, infusing crowds?"

There are other intertextual presences in these pages, and some perhaps unexpected references to other creators of art and ideas: empty courtyards in Latium are likened to desolate landscapes by painter De Chirico in that first poem; there is Hegel's owl of history, flying "only as darkness thickens"; comparisons with passages in the verse Lucretius; and a pronouncement on writing courtesy of Neil Gaiman. However, the force that joins these 2018 poems and the Aeneid is overwhelming, exceeding and encompassing any other reference. All but one of them are fronted by an excerpt from Virgil's poem, mostly from Books 6 and 11, but also 1, 4, 12, 9, and 8. Constants of human behavior can thus be tested or illuminated through quoted words and phrases in Virgil. "Ignorance" is preceded by a quartet of occurrences of ignarus across the Aeneid, before Hadas unfolds a poignant meditation on its value and existences within moral character. This happens in lines balanced between close reading and compacted philosophical thought that only first-rate poetry can manifest:

Ignorance:always asymmetry of what is known;perception's wavering beamin the vast field of darkness,vulnerable as we see...