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Bibliography: Eurydice's voice


Orpheus and Eurydice

Ovid Metamorphoses, Book X, translated by Frank Justus Miller 1916, Loeb Classical Library

Selections from Metamorphoses, read in Latin and English by Rafi Metz. Approx 4 1/2 hours.

Ovid Illustrated: the Reception of Ovid's Metamorphoses in Image and Text http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/latin/ovid/ovidillust.html

Vast collection of Metamorphoses editions and interpretations.

Helen Sword 1989 "Orpheus and Eurydice in the Twentieth Century: Lawrence, H.D. and the Poetics of the Turn," Twentieth Century Literature, 35:4 (Winter 1989), 407-28v

Jonathan Bate 1994 Shakespeare and Ovid Oxford

A.B. Taylor ed 2000 Shakespeare's Ovid Cambridge

Martin West 1983 The Orphic Poems

Suggests early Greek religion was heavily influenced by Central Asian shamanistism.

Charles Sega 1989 Orpheus: The Myth of the Poet Johns Hopkins

Philip K. Dick 1981 The divine invasion Pocket Books

Russell Hoban The Medusa Frequency

Two fine sci fi writers writing with an Orpheus theme.

 

Love Woman

Daniel Bergner 2009 What do women want? New York Times magazine January 22, p28

Carol Gilligan 2003 The birth of pleasure: a new map of love Vintage

Brilliant description of the Love Woman ­ Work Woman split, using the tale of Eros and Psyche. A foundational book in embodiment studies.

Estes Clarissa Pinkola 1992 Women who run with the wolves: myths and stories of the wild woman archetype Ballantine

Handbook on recovering Love Woman. Downright at the same time as it is mythological in Gilligan's way.

Susan Griffin 1978 Woman and Nature: The Roaring Inside Her Harper and Row

Beautifully written cry against loss of Love Woman in individuals and cultures. Love Woman and Work Woman wrote it together.

Marianne Williamson 1994 A woman's worth Ballantine

Gloriously subversive instructions for giving Love Woman a life with integrity. Work Woman hates this book.

Julie Henderson 1999 The Lover Within Station Hill

Groundbreaking work on the bodily energetics of intimacy, "my increasing systemic capacity for charge, pulsation and pleasure." "I began to turn my attention directly to what I experienced, what I liked, what excited me, what satisfied me ­ setting aside all previous judgments, expectations, and demands." Henderson is unusually clear and unflakey on this topic, has a PhD. The book is hard to find but Amazon has it.

Eugene Gendlin 1981 Focusing Bantam

Invaluable simple technique for finding bodily realness.

Andrew Harvey 1991 Hidden journey: a spiritual awakening Henry Holt

A male poet's apprenticeship to Love Woman.

Sharon Olds 2002 The unswept room Knopf (and any of her other books)

If someday, we had to look back
and tell the best hours of our lives,
this was one ­ moving my brow
and nose around, softly, in your armpit

Virginia Woolf To the Lighthouse and The waves

The former can be thought of as a description of Woolf's mother seen as Love Woman, and the latter as written by Love Woman herself.

Eva Pierrakos 1990 The Pathwork of Self-Transformation Bantam

Intelligent guide to the moral work of a difficult love.

Alice Notley 1996 The descent of Alette Penguin Poets

Epic poem about Love Woman's journey in the underworld, written in the form of a series of dreams.

HD Helen in Egypt New Directions

Book length poem spoken by Helen of Troy. A hymn to and from Love Woman.

HD showed a way to penetrate mystery; which means not to flood darkness with light so that darkness is destroyed, but to enter into darkness, mystery so that it is experienced. . . .darkness. . .not evil but the other side . Denise Levertov

In her life's work H.D. returned constantly to a pattern of personal relationships that she found perplexing and felt to be damaging to herself and other women; thralldom to males in romantic and spiritual love. Romantic thralldom is an all-encompassing, totally defining love between unequals. Viewed from a critical, feminist perspective, the sense of completion or transformation that often accompanies thralldom in love has the higher price of obliteration and paralysis, for the entranced self is entirely defined by another. Rachel Blau DuPlessis

H.D. presents herself as an outsider who must express her views from a consciously female perspective. Inheriting uncomfortable male-defined images of women and of history, H.D. responds with palimpsests of encoded revisions of male myths. she discovers behind the recalcitrant and threatening signs of her times a hidden meaning that sustains her quest by furnishing stories of female strength and survival. Susan Gubar