What Flowers in the Dark: A Poetic Journey Through Anthesteria

by H. Jeremiah Lewis

This cycle of poems weaves back and forth from myth to history, the ancient world to the modern devotee's practice, new takes on old stories to new stories with old elements, and even encompasses the extremes of age-old cryptic marginalia to modern political satire, and by such skillful juxtapositions creates a fluid and florid landscape that celebrates as well as elucidates this ancient holy tide of Anthesteria. Populated by deities, heroes, queens and kings, poets, seers and commoners in both tragic and comic masks spanning the corpus of antique and contemporary Dionysian narrative, these poems bring forth an inebriating stream of fine wine soaking a procession of the Dead...and the Dead themselves carry flowers in their hands for those living who would dare to take them up and smell their sweetness, nourished on that same intoxicating stream.

98 pages, Paperback

Published March 17, 2016

Reviews

[Edward Butler]

I savored this little book, reading it very slowly and with great care, because I neither wanted it to end, nor could let each poem pass without reflecting upon it. Fittingly for a book about the Anthesteria, WHAT FLOWERS IN THE DARK opens a door to a textual netherworld, its poems haunted by the titles of ancient books lost to posterity. The author has exceeded himself in this book, whose unity of form and content and stylistic sophistication mark a new plateau in his work.