World Poetry Day 2026: Lowther, Atwood, Carson and Classical Mythology

I read Erin Shields‘s Ransacking Troy in one great gulp this morning, and it’s a bracing way to start the day.

As in her previous work, Shields’s play is reconsidering familiar stories from a feminist perspective in order to recuperate what has been lost or silenced. Her efforts extend from Greek mythology to the present, and her work is always provocative.

[Quick aside for Toronto folks: Shields’s adaptation of Mona Awad’s novel All’s Well has been announced for Fall 2026; prior to that, her new Medusa will be presented this summer, and I’m very keen to see both. And Natalie Haynes’s No Friend to This House, the classicist’s fictional take on Medea, is now in Canadian bookstores in a gorgeous paperback edition that I picked up yesterday as a perhaps-not-ideal Easter present for my daughter.]

All of this has me thinking about how Canadian women poets have worked with classical antecedents by re-weaving texts or using dense allusion.

Exhibit 1: Margaret Atwood’s “Helen of Troy Does Countertop Dancing” [including just a brief excerpt here, to respect copyright]:

I do give value.
Like preachers, I sell vision,
like perfume ads, desire
or its facsimile. Like jokes
or war, it’s all in the timing.
I sell men back their worse suspicions:
that everything’s for sale,
and piecemeal. They gaze at me and see
a chain-saw murder just before it happens,
when thigh, ass, inkblot, crevice, tit, and nipple
are still connected.
Such hatred leaps in them,
my beery worshippers! That, or a bleary
hopeless love. Seeing the rows of heads
and upturned eyes, imploring
but ready to snap at my ankles,
I understand floods and earthquakes, and the urge
to step on ants. I keep the beat,
and dance for them because
they can’t. . . . .

The most extended engagement with Greek mythology before Erin Shields’s plays is likely poet-classicist Anne Carson’s own theatre work Norma Jeane Baker of Troy, which takes on Helen and Marilyn Monroe, an intriguing pairing, to point to the construction of desire, fantasy, and male violence against women.

My copy is packed away in anticipation of a move, so a quotation, with thanks to the GoodReads contributor who posted it:

“If you pick a flower, if you snatch a handbag, if you possess a woman, if you plunder a storehouse, ravage a countryside or occupy a city, you are a taker. You are taking. In ancient Greek you use the verb άρπάζειν, which comes over into Latin as rapio, rapere, raptus sum and gives us English rapture and rape — words stained with the very early blood of girls, with the very late blood of cities, with the hysteria of the end of the world. Sometimes I think language should cover its own eyes when it speaks.”

More from Carson’s text here.

Lowther, last.

I’ve quoted the same passage in two published chapters on very different topics, and it’s from “Kitchen Murders,” a poem that tends to be conflated in tragic and inappropriate ways with the author’s own life and very premature death, which was at the hands of a jealous husband. Jealous not only of her love for another man, but of her greater talent as a poet.

The lines that linger with me:

“Everything here’s a weapon

I pick up a meat fork,

imagine

plunging it in,

a heavy male

thrust.”

In a fascinating Agatha Christie essay that’s focused on food and murder, critic Silvia Baučeková uses Lowther’s lines as an epigraph.

I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking through/around Lowther, with the aim of separating the strands of her life and her work so that I can read the poems in a less over-determined way. I’m hoping, over the next several years, to work with collaborators on a Lowther book whose shape is still developing.

But as I keep worrying, I’m not the ideal reader of poetry. The focused attention that is required doesn’t come naturally to me: I can’t slow down, sufficiently, and I miss crucial elements.

So on today’s World Poetry Day, I’m going to read (very slowly) Karen Solie’s Wellwater, which is winning accolades and prizes all over the place.

To close off this post, here’s some recent work, two poems linked to her teaching life in Scotland.

The closing lines of “An Abundance”:

“And all identified after the fact
but for the banks of wild roses, the poppies you loved

parked like an ambulance by the barley field.”

For me, this conjures up Nick Cave and Kylie Minogue singing “Where the Wild Roses Grow.” World Poetry Day is also an occasion, perhaps, for revisiting favourite murder ballads.