The Death of Persephone: a murder by Yvonne Blomer (Caitlin Press, 2025)

    Fusing Greek myth with the contemporary tropes of crime fiction hasn't been attempted in Canadian poetry before. And it's a challenging and essential exploration. As an aficionado, and sometimes a cringingly reluctant one, of cop dramas often featuring female corpses, I was compelled by Yvonne Blomer's The Death of Persephone: a murder (though why not, I wondered, The Murder of Persephone or a "murder mystery." and why also "Poems" and not "a long poem in parts" or a "novel in verse." Naming anything in a way that makes sense to everyone. So tough).

    At first, being unused to multiple personae in a book of poems (but where is Alfred/Alphonsine on the Dramatis list?), the reader may take a while to feel connected to DI Boca, his "loose shapeless suit," his "ten years" in homicide, or even Stephanie (a young woman, the daughter of Demeter of course, kidnapped by the abusive Uncle H or Hades, who takes her true name of Persephone after her death), but once one slides into the violent flow of the narration, which for me began with "Chapter Two: Living in the Underground," one is transfixed.  

    In the lyric/prosey poem, "Spit Roaster," Stephanie is shown slaving at Uncle H's restaurant, Souvlaki, "reined in...to/make coffee, wipe tables, wash dishes," all menial tasks and not the power roles of slicing, "long sheets of meat" or stoking the fire as "girls can't do that." Interspersed between pieces relating to Stephanie are ones about Athena's creation of the Hecate mural, perceptions of other characters like Steph's aloof underground friend Tom, sequences that depict the amorphous city and the specific underground and, extending throughout the entire book, "Case Notes," 36 in total, made by DI Boca on the murdered women and his quest to find the perpetrator (an extended and interrupted corona of sonnets). Blomer's castigation of the "manosphere" and how it functions to produce and reward "incels" and rapists like Harvey Weinstein is necessarily overt as spoken through the mouths of characters like Thea, who remarks to the inspector, "the city, /men rule it like roaches...do whatever and hate women while they do it" (No 11/36).

    Symbols thread through the text: serpents, owls, bats, and especially, the "paperwhites" or narcissi blooms that are cast upon the murdered women by their self-obsessed killer, the paperwhites also resonating as blank pages, the endless unsolved crimes, especially against women, from ancient times to the present day. As well as the corona of sonnets, Blomer also includes a villanelle ("Athene Noctua," playing on words for silent), postcards, ekphrastic pieces, dialogues, and a powerful set of connected haibuns called "Hades in the Realm of Hades" that elaborates on Uncle H's privileged position as Stephanie escapes and he abducts Helios ("To be entitled is to travel on the scent of slaughtered meat"), contrasting these prose parts with haiku on rain and an iris. The juxtaposition of blind force with this vulnerable flower plunges to one's core. 

    In the poem, "Police Station," Stephanie uncovers Uncle H's dark history and not long after, in "Scratch," she herself is murdered by a business man much later charged by the police, a deeply-wrought scene where the reader gasps as she is punched and choked and "bleeds on moss and brick and wall." The final two chapters are especially powerful, in which we see Stephanie die and become her mythic self Persephone, a spirit able to watch as she is dissected by the pathologist: "Oh, you want to linger on the beauty of the body or/keep it clinical. But it was mine; I was attached to it,/then a man came, bruised every inch, and took it. My face:/a sign of brutal strangulation. /Stomach contents: rice and lunch's drink./They'll send it all for further analysis." 

    As a rally placard in Case Note 33 reads: "NO MORE WOMEN'S LIVES." Writing about the predations of the patriarchy on all, and the continued acceptance of misogyny in this world, is difficult, and especially as poetry. Blomer has found a way, through myth and the murder mystery, to take the reader down a painful but fresh path towards feeling these agonies (and the possibilities of their transformations) once more.