‘Mythology’
— Reneé Bibby
This coming week, in the northern hemisphere, the veil thins, the otherworldly shimmers through, and even for people disinclined to believe in the uncanny there’s an undeniable shift in the balance of night and day that is conducive to dark thoughts. The dead-themed celebrations strip us from the anesthetized day-glow of fluorescent lights, to stand in nature, connect to something ancient and powerful, to death, decay. Kim Suttell’s poem, ‘Mythology’ is a poem that beats in the vein of Halloween and Day of the Dead, in that it summons deep, ancient powers inextricably rooted in nature, like the deities of old, wrathful and destructive, and only temporarily mollified by sacrifice. Suttell’s god of unbound growth of yeast and cancer, the power to burn the food on the hearth, haunts the speaker in the poem. She’s been undone by the capricious god. What she’s lost is left unexplained. Maybe in modern times there would be a clinical treatment, long weeks tucked in bed, but this time of year, this time in history there’s only the unkind god. The shadow shifting between the seen and unseen.