Jo Balmer: a poem

© Alistair Common

Jo Balmer writes:

"Niobe"' is taken from my first poetry collection, Chasing Catullus: Poems, Translations and Transgressions (Bloodaxe) which celebrates its 20th anniversary in print this year. The poem comes from the volume's central sequence, written in the form of a diary, which records the illness and death of my young niece Rachel from stomach cancer, often approaching this difficult and painful subject through classical myth and literature. It is loosely based on a few lines from a choral ode in Sophocles' tragedy, Antigone (l.823-31), which tell how, after Niobe's seven sons and seven daughters were killed by the jealous gods Apollo and Artemis, in her grief and tears she was slowly transformed to weather-beaten stone. Sophocles locates these events in a remote, mountainous region of Lydia in Asia Minor, but I relocated the imagery to Britain and the far west of Cornwall, our family home. Thanks are due to Bloodaxe for their permission to use the poem.

Niobe

    (2/8: 7.22AM)

(after Sophocles)

Like a cloud-burst on a Penwith day

that had to come yet still startles, shocks;

think of granite veined with pale-rose quartz,

a fret of stone where the bracken's frayed

by aching, flint-pierced, moorland streams;

the bind of ivy, the prick of gorse,

hedged in with comfrey, helleborine;

sob of rain, scar of hail, snow shrinking

to sigh, the sound of words you can't say.

Chasing Catullus was published by Bloodaxe Books in 2004. Josephine Balmer is a poet and classical translator. Her translations of Sappho have been continuously in print since 1984 and in 1989 were shortlisted for the inaugural US Lambda Literary Awards. In 2018, they were reissued in an expanded edition to include newly-discovered fragments (Bloodaxe Books). Her recent collection, The Paths of Survival (Shearsman), was shortlisted for the 2017 London Hellenic Prize. Other works include Letting Go (Agenda Editions, 2017), The Word for Sorrow (Salt, 2007), Catullus: Poems of Love and Hate (Bloodaxe, 2004) and Classical Women Poets (Bloodaxe, 1996). She has also published a study of classical translation and versioning, Piecing Together the Fragments (OUP, 2013). Her latest publication, Ghost Passage, was published by Shearsman in 2022.