there's beautiful flourishes sometimes; poetry is not something to skim but it feels like so little is here that i must—circling back, reimagining, recontextualizing, and trying to make it all fit together. there's too many missing pieces to do that often, but that's also what makes this collection feel even more imperishable... even if much of her work has proven to be the opposite in time.

and there's really only one piece that sticks out as astonishing, as something that transcends all time and place, and creates my favorite expression in verse i've yet read:

...off in Sardis
And often turns her thoughts back to our shores.

The girl adored you more than anything,
As if you were a goddess –
But most of all she loved to hear you sing.

Now she outshines those dames with Lydian faces
Just as, when the sun
Has set, the rosy-fingered Moon surpasses

The stars surrounding her. With equal grace
She casts her lustre on
The flower-rich fallows and the sterile seas.

Dew is poured out in handsome fashion; lissome
Chervil unfurls; Rose
And Sweet Clover with heady flowers blossom.

Often on long walks she commemorates
How tender Atthis was.
Her fortune eats at her inconstant thoughts...

this doesn't even feel real. and in the wrong place, i think—much like most poetry to my eyes—it can come across as unduly cloying. but i always see through to what it contextualizes (which is likely the most valuable part, to me, of this specific issuing), and how it skips through everything brilliantly minutely, everything that makes this time period's mysticism mean something.

the chopped segments of a triangular connection, 'rosy-fingered' as simile between a Homeric epithet and blood-red moons, dew brought to fall by that very presence—and crucially, an uncertainty of when we return to earth, to life from that simile. how does it connect together, sight and the stars and the impression that has been set upon you? there's some bridge between them, but it is invisible right now; it cannot help. all we know is that, under the moon she was compared to is seen her walking, and there must be some other connection to the speaker. you must go there, meet in the middle somehow.

it's fascinatingly dense—and it's a pang that never ceases, wrapped up in this aching desire, free from the body. and while i wished that all that's here would be the same, the reinterpretations of Homer and disparate musings on marriage customs at the time certainly weigh it down. anchored in time and tradition they fall awkwardly, not breaking molds in quite the same way as the rest of what's been found of Sappho.

the two tattered mummy scraps determined to be her work though are appreciated as an appendix; but so much of the value here is in an ephemeral desire to read more, to see more through her eyes. yet it's just not there; it's become invisible.

i'm not sure if i want more of her to be found. maybe this is really is plenty. her immortality in inspiration is more than enough.