In A Girl Loves a Girl, British poet Jeremy Reed revamps Sappho, the legendary archaic Greek lyric poet from the island of Lesbos. As with all his audaciously frontline poetry and fiction, Reed places history as now in the present, mediated over by update, rather than consigned to the irretrievable past. As a pioneering reaction to academic attempts to literally recreate a poetry that exists only in fragmentary form, he remakes and expands on the possibilities of meaning in predominantly same-sex motivated poetry in a way that will bring one of the greatest poets of ancient Greece alive to 21st-century readers. Only Jeremy Reed would dare override scholars from the viewpoint of presenting Sappho in a legacy that extends to new generations of her admirers, as a symbol of love and desire between women.
In A Girl Loves a Girl, British poet Jeremy Reed revamps Sappho, the legendary archaic Greek lyric poet from the island of Lesbos. As with all his audaciously frontline poetry and fiction, Reed places history as now in the present, mediated over by update, rather than consigned to the irretrievable past. As a pioneering reaction to academic attempts to literally recreate a poetry that exists only in fragmentary form, he remakes and expands on the possibilities of meaning in predominantly same-sex motivated poetry in a way that will bring one of the greatest poets of ancient Greece alive to 21st-century readers. Only Jeremy Reed would dare override scholars from the viewpoint of presenting Sappho in a legacy that extends to new generations of her admirers, as a symbol of love and desire between women.