Review by Booklist Review
Sappho (c. 620-c. 570 BCE) is considered the first and, some say, the best woman poet. Her work survives primarily as a few words each in contiguous lines, sometimes as complete lines or stanzas, exceptionally as whole or nearly whole poems. Hellenic and Roman grammarians preserved about half of what's extant; scantier fragments come from papyri unearthed by archaeological expeditions, such as the one that found parts of a hitherto unknown poem in 1896. Shards of another new poem about aging emerged in 1922; much more of it 80 years later. In 2014, two poems about her brothers were added to the canon. Though they vitally inform it, such discoveries occupy little of Freeman's wonderfully accessible exposition on what kind of person Sappho was. Hers was a wealthy and powerful family that endured years of exile in Sicily while other clans ruled Lesbos; she had three brothers and a daughter; she was long lived for her time. Probably not a lesbian by modern definitions, she indisputably saw other women erotically. The introduction to a perennially spellbinding figure.--Olson, Ray Copyright 2016 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Classics professor and novelist Freeman (Sacrifice: A Celtic Adventure) expertly reconstructs the remarkable background of Sappho, the "first and greatest of the women poets in the ancient world," from slender and fragmentary evidence. With deep and careful consideration, Freeman pieces together the surviving information about Sappho's life, using classical literature, myth, and visual art to chisel a peephole into the lives of ancient Greek women. Freeman ably maps the political, spiritual, and cultural territory of ancient Greece while deftly mining Sappho's poetry for insights into the passages of childhood and aging, marriage and motherhood, and desire and exile as they might have been experienced by "this woman who stands at the beginning of history." Freeman's portrait of this legendary woman responsible for "some of the greatest poetry the human heart has ever composed" is vivid and immediate, though necessarily incomplete. His translations of the nearly 200 existing Sapphic poems and fragments reveal a haunting music that's bound to enchant lovers of poetry, history, and the classical world. Agent: Joelle Delbourgo, Joelle Delbourgo Associates. (Feb.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Sappho, the female lyric poet from the island of Lesbos in ancient Greece, succeeded as a writer when women were seen as chattel-wool weavers, housekeepers, and incubators of heirs. The passage of time rendered her work incomplete, with only remnants surviving on fragile fragments of papyrus, yet a fascination with her words and with her life persists in contemporary Western society. Freeman (classics, Luther Coll.; Oh My Gods: A Modern Retelling of Greek and Roman Myths) uses Sappho's poetry, along with primary and secondary sources, to curate a hypothetical portrait of Sappho's life as well as an intriguing glimpse into the lives of women in the centuries surrounding her lifetime. The complex and progressive views on sexuality and religion in ancient Greece are also discussed. Freeman's writing is augmented with annotations, several photographs, a map, and a time line. The entirety of Sappho's surviving poetry appears in a dedicated section at the end of the book. VERDICT Highly recommended for readers interested in women's studies and/or the poetry of ancient Greece.-Nerissa Kuebrich, Chicago © Copyright 2016. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
From fragmentary sources, a classicist reconstructs the life and times of the poet Plato called the 10th Muse. Biographical facts about Sappho "are few and often subject to dispute," acknowledges Freeman (Classics/Luther Coll.; Oh My Gods: A Modern Retelling of Greek Myths, 2012, etc.), and of nine scrolls of her poetry once housed in the ancient Library of Alexandria, only a few poems remain, some represented by a single word. Since a biography is impossible, the author looks to literary, artistic, and archaeological sources to investigate women's experiences on the island of Lesbos in the late seventh to early sixth centuries B.C.E. The result is an authoritative, insightful narrative that looks at childhood, marriage, motherhood, sexuality, religion, and death to speculate about the realities of Sappho's life. Freeman is certain that Sappho was married, "since the single life was simply not a viable option, especially for a woman" and since weddings emerged as a theme in her poetry. She was a mother, with a beloved daughter, Cleis, with whom she apparently lived in her old age. Beyond these deductions, Freeman offers surprising details about marriage customs (brides, for example, were usually at least 15 years younger than husbands), beliefs about conception and pregnancy ("women were simply incubators for men," contributing nothing to conception), and women's religious practices. Among hundreds of deities, the goddess Demeter was singled out for women's worship, a practice, the author remarks, that "naturally aroused the discomfort of men accustomed to keeping women in their place." Sexuality was a fluid concept in ancient Greece, with no word for "homosexual," and male same-sex relationships were tolerated more than lesbian relationships. From her descriptions of erotic love, Freeman concludes that Sappho preferred women. Appended to the biography are the author's translations of nearly 200 pieces. "I long for and seek after," one fragment reads, serving well as an epigraph for this evocative book about a mysterious ancient literary figure. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
