Out of Avernus

Barbara A. Holland (1925-1988) was called "the Sybil of Greenwich Village," not only for her sometimes eerie presence and her incantatory readings, but also because she wrote a number of powerful poems on mythological women. In 1976, the poet went off to the Macdowell Colony in New Hampshire with a working manuscript collecting her unique "impressions and impersonations" of famed or unknown women who, "in conflict with the gods or the mores and customs of their cultures, are alienated." The manuscript she brought back to her Greenwich Village home yielded some powerful poems that she read for the rest of her life, inhabiting the spirits of the classical Cassandra, Sybil, and Eurydice; the Biblical Lilith, Hagar, and the Witch of Endor; the medieval snake-woman Melusine and Wagner's Grail-temptress Kundrie; two 12th-century Hindu saints, and even a Revolutionary War-era witch who spied for General George Washington at Valley Forge.Seen in the context of the feminist poetry being written in New York in the 1970s, Holland's work can be seen as a recasting and re-voicing of women's magical attributes, both for good and evil. This is the 257th publication of The Poet's Press.