Aphrodite's Daughter: Poems

By Becky Gould Gibson

From villages in Crete to Carolina farms to San Francisco pavement, the women in these poems struggle to live by their own lights, despite pressure for them to serve as mere appendages to men. Aphrodite's Daughter tells stories of women in myth, history, art, and contemporary life. The goddess's daughter, fed up with her role in her mother's story, says to her: "i'm leaving--i'm walking out/of your myth finally--i need a mother not a love goddess. . . . " This volume springs from the sense that, as Adrienne Rich reminds us, under patriarchy women often feel "wildly unmothered."

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1933896108
• ISBN13: 9781933896106
• Release Date: October 2007
• Publisher: Trp: The University Press of Shsu
• Length: 80 Pages
• Weight: 0.28 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.3" x 5.9" x 8.5"

Customer Reviews

Feminist without being overly done

Aphrodite's Daughter, winner of the 2006 XJ Kennedy Poetry Prize, is a feminist study expressed in 38 poems. Gibson predominantly uses themes surrounding the relationships of mothers and daughters. The collection also seeks to understand - on a larger scope - the roles women seek for themselves or those which they are given by society. The first section of the collection has a strong Greco-Roman-Mythological influence. My favorite is "aphrodite@earthlink.net" for the way it skillfully combines the classical with the modern. In this poem, written in the loose style of email, Harmonia writes to her mother: "- i'm leaving - i'm walking out of your myth finally - i need a mother not a love goddess with gold hair poured from a bottle."