![]() ![]() There before Mount Ida, he and his Myrmidons, “for nine years…have been cooped up here on the beach, all the vast hordes of them, Greeks of every clan and kingdom.” Malouf’s principal source, of course, is the greatest story any human has ever told, the majestic songs of the Iliad and Odyssey. “The man is a fighter,” writes Malouf, “but when he is not fighting he is a farmer, earth is his element.” It is the job of Achilles to put other men into the earth, many of them, as he takes his part in the ugly curse of the House of the Atreus. A man stands on the shore, his ear cocked, listening for what we might imagine to be the whispering spirit of his mother. ![]() Malouf ( The Complete Stories, 2007, etc.) opens on a characteristically quiet note as he looks back more than 3,000 years to the plains of Scamander. ![]() The Australian poet of absences and silences reimagines the terror and exhilaration of the Trojan War. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |