This arresting first collection from poet and artist Elizabeth McManus delights with its meld of classical legend and intense personal experience. Dancing playfully at the edges of familiar tales, it seduces with its range of poetic form and startling imagery, the text itself subtly enriched by the delicate design of Lorna Gray. These are accessible, memorable poems, which come from a place of silence and leave the reader restored by the pleasure of the poetic journey.

They are poems also that look ‘behind the headlines’ of classical, and other, legend, sneaking a peak ‘off-stage’ at the ordinary lurking beneath the extraordinary. As such, they will appeal to Sixth Form and undergraduate students of Classics and the Humanities more generally, complementing modules on legend, myth, and the world of the hero in particular, and claiming a place on a prescribed reading list as a prompt to broader imaginative engagement with familiar texts.

The title poem recalls the disappointment of Icarus, no longer flying high but ‘Slunk into beachside scrub/Scorched by shame’ before ‘He walked into town/Remaining silent thereafter’. Odysseus, in Later, Odysseus, is both reluctant battlefield hero and nostalgic domestic retreatant, looking back over his shoulder

Homeric allusions, in The Duty We Owe Our Dead and in Wreckers, counterpose the rites of death with the urgency of living, as Helen ‘watches doomed ships in/Lamp eyes shining steadfast beacons/Ships break casting goods/Shadows trawl through sand’, while ‘The duty we owe our dead/Is only to live/No need for chariots/To drag their bodies/Round city walls’. Instead,

At times, mirth and amusement burst into the sacred enclave of myth and hallowed legend, no more so than in Return to Eden, where in whimsical sequel, Adam and Eve one day awaken to find on their doorstep ‘An apologetic serpent, With a note/Between its fangs’. It’s a note from God and the serpent, like remorseful leaseholders who have just evicted the best tenants they could ever hope for, saying they miss the pair of them and

Yet it is ‘the amazing ordinary’ and the ‘small hellos’ which frame and enliven the legendary and extraordinary, the evasions of our ‘ordinary…everyday faces’ both concealing yet facilitating the epiphany of silent communion. This is an everyday ordinariness that accommodates love and death, both entirely natural yet capable of surprise. In It’s No Secret,

In love, relief can be both ‘extreme’ and ‘light’. In Light Relief,

More urgently, in Unrepentant, and with haiku-like brevity:

Death, however, is never far away in these poems. In Rubicon, we witness mourning for a mother who is ‘disappearing…moved to another country’ until finally ‘she’s far away/Melting like a sugar mouse’. It’s that ‘melting’ into death that sets the tone for other poems that evoke the transience of life. In Meltdown, the body in its coffin is ‘plain and straight’ and where ‘A frenzy of atoms/Settles like snow/Outside weather shades/Melting’. The solace of resurrection is absent – ‘No phoenix, no lazarus’ – yet ‘This point of perfection/Comes to silence in still flesh/Hands fall open’.

In similar spirit, the poet anticipates her own death in Going Out, expressing the desire

These allusions to an old Irish blessing and a devotional hymn sung by Snatam Kaur aptly evoke both Celtic and eastern spirituality as the context for the final ‘Going out into mystery’, not without defiance:

This ‘going out’ is that same ‘coming to silence in still flesh’, greeted with hands fallen open at a point of perfection. And in the final poem of the collection, Chagall Saw It, we are left in no doubt that we have been privileged to encounter here a fresh poetic vision stripped of illusion yet rich enough to provide sustenance for the journey that is in the end one of hope and affirmation: