By Charles Rammelkamp
Structured around Aeschylus’ Oresteia, the trilogy of Greek tragedies concerning Clytemnestra’s murder of her husband Agamemnon in revenge for his sacrifice of their daughter Iphigenia, to kick off the Trojan War, followed by her murder by their son Orestes and the intervention of the Furies, Every Form of Ruin likewise considers some of the broad themes of (in)justice, loneliness, filial obligation, women as witches and worse. Erin Adair-Hodges’s three-part collection comes in order with epigraphs from Agamemnon, The Libation Bearers, and The Eumenides, further echoing the arc of the drama. But is the curse on the House of Atreus lifted? You decide.
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As in her previous collection, Let’s All Die Happy, there’s plenty about the challenges of womanhood, the loneliness of motherhood, the despair of adolescence. In “Juvenilia,” in which a classroom friend named Tanya childishly taunts the narrator about her fondness for milk (“If you love it so / much why don’t you marry it?”), she recognizes that “I am becoming / a woman who’ll do almost anything // to be wanted,” and in “The End of September” (“The season of barns yellowing like teeth”), “I have hated / my body enough to love anyone who wants it, / which wasn’t love at all but a dog / glorying in the not-kick.” As she grows older, in “I Have Cried Off All My Makeup,” a poem in the voice of a woman in Toledo who lives in her car: “Men have trouble guessing my age / which makes it hard for them to know / in which way to dismiss me.” It’s the same damn rock she’s rolling up the hill, like Sisyphus!
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Indeed, in “On a Hike Up Prospect Rock with Three Women Sixteen Years My Junior”, she writes, “I’ve shuffled now / into a new invisibility—I’m ma’amed / the whole day through.” “Song in the Key of Negged” alludes to the 1990’s slang term, “negging,” which is the practice of giving backhanded compliments and generally making comments that express indifference toward a woman, in an attempt to seduce her.
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Yet for all her melancholy, Adair-Hodges evinces a darkly comic wit. It’s evident in so many of the poem titles: “When I Say Jesus Was My Boyfriend,” “Love Song of Iphigenia in a Teen Movie Asked to Prom as Part of a Prank,” “Self-Portrait as Erinyes’ Dating Profile,” “Song in the Key of Men Who Try to Fuck Me Then Say They Loved Me as a Friend,” “Love Song as a Parking Lot in Which Boys from My High School Do Donuts,” to name a few.
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In “New Grammar” she wittily captures the Sisyphus-like tedium of “momming”:
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I mom the daily agenda for the child
whom pandemic has made my pupil, mom
the other job the emails the crying out
Professor Mom, we have been stranded
in a wilderness with no compass and no
stars—can you pick us up? I mom and do.
I mom cool water to their lips, mom
the quivering to sleep. I tell them it will be
alright, which is how to mom a lie.
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But all this does go back millennia, baked into the cake as it were, hence the relevance of Aeschylus. In another amusingly titled poem, “Wherein I Attempt to Write about Something Different Than Women’s Anger after an Editor Calls My Work Brilliant but ‘Single-Minded,’” she writes: “Far from a city, the stars
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boast, human stories on the skin of space. Easiest to find Orion,
star of the show, the menace of his hanging sword. He’s hunting
the Pleiades, seven sisters, turned celestial to protect their flesh
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from him. All these women – the youth of Andromeda, chained
as an offering to a monster, her mother hung to make her watch.
This world. I take off these glasses, rub my eyes
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like I’m erasing something.
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Back to those Greeks indeed! The origin of the cosmos! The book title, Every Form of Ruin, comes from The Libation Bearers, in which the chorus sings of Clytemnestra:
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She couples with every form of ruin known to mortals.
Woman, frenzied, driven wild with lust,
twists the dark, warm harness
of wedded love—tortures man and beast!
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The contrast between revenge and justice is at the heart of the Oresteia, replacing personal vendetta with courtroom judgement. “My Best Friend’s Abuser Takes Her to Court” focuses on this issue. It’s Halloween, the two friends costumed in black wings. When asked what they are, “Vengeance, I say. Justice, she corrects.” And the abuser? “He wants her to stop writing about the things he did, / different than wanting not to have done them at all.” Similarly, in “Self-Portrait as Portrait of the Erinyes Pursuing Orestes,” she asks, “What woman hasn’t felt / the knife some son calls justice?”
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At the conclusion of The Eumenides, the final play in the Oresteia cycle, Athena changes the name of the Erinyes – the Furies – to “The Gracious Ones” (Eumenides) – and the curse on the House of Atreus with its endless cycle of retribution is said to be over. Erin Adair-Hodges’ take on this? Not so fast! The final poem, “Lake Eumenides,” ends:
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I don’t want to be made to forgive
I want hurt to find its own hut on the lip of some other lake,
ripping over the still surface to see itself,
its violent truth
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Or I would forgive, if I thought that in doing so,
I would not disappear
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October and the leaves aren’t dying. They are screaming
As the lake pulls ne under, I finally hear.
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Erin Adair-Hodges’s poetry is gorgeous, a sheer delight to read, the nimbleness of language, the clever phrasing. So many lines the reader wishes s/he could steal! But we’re left to ponder about that distinction between justice and revenge, the curse we all live under.
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You can find the book here: https://upittpress.org/books/9780822966913/
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Charles Rammelkamp is Prose Editor for Brick House Books in Baltimore and Reviews Editor for The Adirondack Review. His most recent releases are Sparring Partners from Mooonstone Press, Ugler Lee from Kelsay Books and Catastroika from Apprentice House.
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