THE DAUGHTERS OF DISCORDIA

Owens, who grew up in Toronto, currently teaches courses in poetry, writing, and acting in the Boston area. This, her first published collection, is the 21st volume in the A. Poulin, Jr. New Poets of America Series. Beginning with Zeus’s expulsion of the instigating goddess Discordia (Eris) from Olympus, and chronicling the criminal (and usually violent) exploits of feminine rogues from 1638 to the present, the poet goes well beyond presenting a mere gallery of static portraits. Her characters breathe and bleed and perpetrate, in the process engendering a good deal of sympathy. These women are not simply monstrous villains who act out of unknowable motives, nor are they completely innocent of the blood they spill. Owens’s collection breaks ranks with recent whiny, politically correct works that see all women as prey and that confer nearly religious status upon victimhood—as though being victimized were sufficient proof of one’s beatitude. Owens, however, does not permit her work to be so neatly circumscribed. True, the women she depicts often suffer under a system of unequal justice that, in the actual practice of the law, gives an advantage to male oppressors. But the poet draws upon history’s ample collection of witches, heretics, killers of husbands and children, gangster molls, terrorists, double agents, and even female cattle rustlers to make the point of a dark interior to the feminine psyche that proves the equal of the Jungian anima in every regard.

The nefarious deeds recounted here present women who are proud, complex, defiant, and (through the mouth of the poet) stoically eloquent.