Poetry Review: ‘Helen of Troy, 1993,’ by Maria Zoccola

HELEN OF TROY, 1993: Poems, by Maria Zoccola

In Greek mythology, Helen was the daughter of Leda, born from an egg after Leda was raped by Zeus in the form of a swan. Helen married King Menelaus of Sparta, then ran off with Paris from Troy, precipitating the 10-year Trojan War as a Greek alliance fought to get Helen back.

In her first book of poems, “Helen of Troy, 1993,” Maria Zoccola has beautifully and resourcefully reimagined this mythic material and relocated it to Sparta, Tenn., which is a real town between Nashville and Knoxville. By doing so she has provided a witty and acute anatomy of small-town life and of our own American cultural and spiritual barrenness.

The world of prose fiction has seen this trick of ventriloquizing the classics in books like Madeline Miller’s 2018 novel “Circe,” about the enchantress who tries to detain Odysseus on her island. But Zoccola’s project was probably more influenced by the gritty working-class truth-telling of contemporary poets like Diane Seuss and the antic daring of those like Carol Ann Duffy, a Scottish poet whose 1999 volume “The World’s Wife” presented a series of dramatic monologues by ignored or silenced women from myth and history: Mrs. Midas, Pontius Pilate’s wife, Mrs. Darwin, Frau Freud, Eurydice and so forth.

What Zoccola achieves, while intermittently comic, is in fact quite searching in its explorations of a young Southern housewife (Menelaus is known as “the Big Cheese” in this book) who has her first child, a daughter, at the age of 21. The poems speak not only in the voice of Helen, but also in the voices of a chorus of “the Spartan women” gossiping about Helen and even in the voice of a god who may be the inseminating swan observing his own daughter.

Sparta in 1993 “is divided/into pride and shame, cash and stamps.” Women with “cursive lists” shop at Piggly Wiggly. Helen talks on the phone with her half sister Clytemnestra (known as “Cly”) through “bellsouth’s web of silver wires” and submits to the “dance-class kill squad” and “plié overlord” of a daughter’s ballet school or to “driving the dress shirts/to the dry cleaner and buffing the goddamn naugahyde,” returning to a “house quiet as a tick bite.”

Only by watching reruns of “Cheers” and “Golden Girls” and “All in the Family” can Helen intuit the will of the gods and get a sense of “some great generational curse/working itself out through the medium/of their bodies.” Folding laundry, Helen tells the reader, “i don’t know if you have ever started growing/away from yourself”; cleaning up after a barbecue, she muses that “i didn’t know i was a person/until i stopped being one.”

Longing for excitement, for having “my name typed up where it can’t/blow away again,” she has her fling, her “unauthorized/pornographic ignominy,” but inevitably returns home (asking the cab to stop a mile out of town) and notices again the absolute mundanity of what she has fled, the McDonald’s and Wendy’s and Chuck E. Cheese, the Pilot gas station and “dandelions threading through tins/of chaw” by the roadside. Her shame is mixed with defiance: She will continue “foraging/in the threads of the world for a story i like better/than the one i’ve been telling.”

Homer’s “Odyssey” begins, in Robert Fagles’s translation, “Sing to me of the man, Muse, the man of twists and turns/driven time and again off course, once he had plundered/the hallowed heights of Troy.” Near the end of Zoccola’s book, we find a different invocation: “gods of old worlds, gods of our worlds: i try to tell you/important things, things that happened, hours emerging/with claws and fangs.” Time is indeed a feral presence amid the desolations of “a get-out town./a valley you leave as soon as you’re grown,” and being driven off course — for example, with a stranger who asks if you’ve ever been north — is the only alternative to a slow spiritual destruction.

By the time she addresses the gods, Helen is no longer speaking of just herself, but of a collective of women who wanted

nothing big, nothing lavish, nothing more
than our due: one single calendar page of sunshine

and bright sand, booze-dark sea stretching out into a song
we can’t sing but have been humming all our lives.

Zoccola’s Helen has succeeded in joining her mythic forebear.

The publisher’s materials announce this book as the product of someone who is “not the product of an elite M.F.A. program, but an avid reader, writer and educator dedicated to her craft,” as if these two conditions were mutually exclusive. The publicity also includes the by-now obligatory nod to the collection’s “formally accomplished” nature, though Zoccola’s poems are straightforward free verse, and the distinction of the book is not in its form but in its voice.

That, and in engaging her reader. As she lists her cravings in pregnancy, Helen exclaims, “triscuits, I tell him./get me birdseed and eggshells and shards of ice.” Her ennui and restlessness are our own.

HELEN OF TROY, 1993: Poems | By Maria Zoccola | Scribner | 78 pp. | Paperback, $18