The Long Costs of More Than Enough

Poets have long been drawn to the Persephone myth. Contemporary writers such as Eavan Boland, Rita Dove, Louise Glück, and Shara McCallum have all offered their own retellings of the goddess of spring, kidnapped (or enticed, depending on the version) by Hades and forced to spend four months out of the year in the underworld. This story is meant to explain the need for the cyclical fallow period of winter, but it works beautifully in Megan Grumbling’s latest collection, Persephone in the Late Anthropocene, as a symbol of all that has gone wrong in our current era of environmental decline. In writing from multiple perspectives—Persephone; her mother, Demeter: a collective “we”— as well as interspersing her poems with fictionalized found texts, Grumbling blends myth and reality to remarkable effect. As she writes in “Song of Reasons,” Persephone’s story, and the earth’s current state, depicts “The long costs of more / than enough” (lines 11-12). While Persephone’s sacrifice once symbolized the regenerative cycle of the natural world, Grumbling’s work questions how much longer the earth can continue to sustain our rapaciousness.

Persephone in the Late Anthropocene by Megan Grumbling. Acre Books, 2020. 120 pages. $16.

    Grumbling’s book is divided into four sections: Ascent, Search, Descent, and And Ascent, in keeping with the structure of the original myth. Throughout these sections, she includes quotations from her own version of The New Farmer’s Almanac—“Folklore for January” admonishes, “Avoid whistling in doorways, as you may wake the Rains” (9)—as well as passages from equally fictitious reference works on the Anthropocene that directly address the Persephone myth, poke fun at the Modern Language Association’s recent formatting updates, or analyze climate-fiction and the imaginatively named Anti-Protagonism school of literary thought. No matter the form—lineated verse, aphoristic Almanac entry, or prose poem—Grumbling maintains the focus on her mythic underpinnings and on the way language plays a role both in the myth and in contemporary society.

    The opening section focuses on the mystery of Persephone’s descent and the earth’s decline, both in winter and in the Anthropocene. As Demeter explains in “While She Was Gone”:

                Mysteries
are, well, not secrets

exactly. Anyone could learn them. Let’s say
they were a story. Or a cup. Let’s say

they were some part mirror
some part scythe. (lines 11-16)

Just as the Persephone myth was created to explain the seasons, it also serves, now, as a mirror to our lives of shameless abundance and as a scythe that hacks away at our self-serving belief in our right to conspicuous consumption. To that end, the speaker of “Adultery Song” argues, “Abundance / is our birthright, and the only sin on earth / to abstain” (lines 13-15). Persephone eating the four pomegranate seeds offered by Hades is nothing in comparison to the abundance it created on earth, which we have refused to treat with moderation.

    The world of “trouble eating,” a prose poem from section two, shows the dangers of abundance: “We were having trouble eating. Acid reflux. Anxious sphincter syndrome” (35). These are among “The long costs of more / than enough,” as summed up at the end of “Song of Reasons” (lines 11-12). Once again, Grumbling expertly weaves together the myth of Persephone and the reality of our present condition. At the beginning of “Song of Reasons,” Persephone explains her reasons “For leaving the old man,” Hades, who is as much a glutton as these poems accuse contemporary society of being (line 1). Hades’ desire for more and more leads to “Not naught. / But aches. Chafes” (lines 10-11), connecting this poem to the people of “trouble eating.”

    Grumbling succeeds in making this connection even more starkly, and beautifully, in “Fruit-Eating Song,” also from the second section. Here, Persephone partakes of more of Hades’ seeds, seeking to cure what ails the world, to no avail. She attempts to solve the mystery of “missing milkweed,” representative of the earth’s waning abundance, to the extent that she 

sometimes now starve[s] even June to solve
the wrong. Leaking seas, thirst,
heat rash. Heartburn, Mother,
swallowing. Mother, I have learned
new ways the throat will strain. (lines 11-15)

This right-justified poem is full of so many incredible lines it is tempting to quote it in full. The lines, “I see the sweetest things / gone missing. Songbirds. Fisheries and favorite trees” (lines 21-22) with their consonance and rhythm, thanks in part to the perfectly-deployed one-word sentence, point this poem toward its conclusion four lines later:

a stolen            a sieve                a song. (line 26)

    Where lyricism is at the fore in the second section, the third, Descent, depicts the experience of Hades as one of a breakdown in language. Grumbling accomplishes this in several ways, beginning with the stringing together of words in “Guilt Telling”: “elevenfootsearisefleeingdrowning” (line 21). Later, in “To be Unlit,” the letters in the word deadzones become, “dadesozen, aeddnezos” (line 18). Even more extreme, the prose poem “deadzone” contains a half-page of strung-together words before devolving into a series of well-spaced symbols and punctuation marks that lead into another series of scrambled “dead zones.” 

While some of the plural speakers of “What happened?” “might / want to stay” below with Persephone (lines 5-6), the collection’s fourth section describes what happens after her ascent. It’s no wonder that after the third section, the speakers of the poem “the life of her” “were bruised and spent” (line 1). Interestingly, this new normal is the book’s shortest section, signifying the disappointment of returning to life as usual, which reinforces Persephone’s desire to descend, once again, the following winter and implies a bleak but open-ended future for the earth, depending on humanity’s willingness to change. Persephone speaks for all of us, in “Light Song,” in announcing:

In the light sometimes
I am learning sorrow and joy
as the same breath rising
in the chest, in the throat. (lines 17-20)

The world we live in necessitates such an education in “sorrow and joy”; but as Persephone explains, it is possible to begin in sorrow yet end in joy, just as the breath originates “in the chest” but travels up “the throat.”

    “The New Farmer’s Almanac Riddle of the Day” from late in section four serves as an excellent summation of the book and of our experience of the world around us: “Why is everything in the world so mysterious?” The answer? “Because we cannot make it out” (97). This sounds tautological at first, but no matter Demeter’s desire to view mysteries as stories, as “some part mirror / some part scythe,” some mysteries cannot be solved. We might even be better off this way. For, like pulling back the curtain on a magic trick, knowing the reasons for “everything in the world” might lead to even deeper degrees of disenchantment than this collection predicts in its varied fictionalized reference works (which I have not covered, so full of wonder is this collection).

    A note before the text of Persephone In the Late Anthropocene explains that it “began its life as an experimental spoken opera.” Grumbling’s polyvocal approach would make for an incredible libretto. The note includes the URL for recordings of the work, with music by the late composer Denis Nye. Nevertheless, this collection makes for a stunning experience in written form as well. Grumbling has succeeded in reinvigorating the Persephone myth for a contemporary audience so viscerally that it is a wonder no one thought to do so before. All readers will be better off for having experienced Grumbling’s work.