I recently read a compelling article, by Dan Chiasson, about the life and work of James Schuyler.* Chiasson identifies two “primary verse modes” in Schuyler’s poetry: blips and loop-the-loops. The former involve short phrases and sharp enjambments; the latter, “margin-busting lines reminiscent of Walt Whitman.” Catherine Strisik nimbly employs both of these modes in Goat, Goddess, Moon. Whitman would be pleased:
I am soft with healing after
I am luxuriant with good fortune after
I am cloaked by lady beetles a scent of salted olive, my nature after
all means spacious means rhododendron and a pretty mouth.
Goat, Goddess, Moon also has me thinking about Arthur Rimbaud and Sylvia Plath, Louise Gluck and James Joyce. Though Joyce is regarded more as a novelist than a poet, the incantatory outbursts of Stephen Dedalus have much in common with those of Strisik’s first-person narrator (“I love this story—”), Katerina. Prose poetry? Free verse? Confessional verse? Whatever their generic label, many of Strisik’s stanzas strike deeply, often in the present tense:
One street over from Saint Katerina there is a Greek bakery, Elpis:
Yeast bubbles, dough coils into braids. Sun’s warmth
at the counter where I stand eye level
to the scented breads, inhale inhale
inhale our three thousand years’
rising
Strisik’s diction can be challenging. To be sure of its meaning, I looked up “fascia” on line, where the AI overview defined it as “a continuous network of connective tissue that surrounds, supports, and separates muscles, organs, blood vessels, and nerves throughout the body.” Then I returned to the prose poem “vein,” in which Katerina describes her “handsome sweet grandfather,” who “held my hand the way his mother held his with affectionate fondling as though reaching through the dermis to the fascia the muscle to the vein where I am the rest of his story.”
The rest of his story (which she loves) is “not a story,/ more the truth and a memory” . . . “not a story,/ more the truth.” Katerina contradicts herself, repeats herself, stutters along at times, not always sure of what she has yet revealed: “did I mention the blue/ dress bought in Thessaloniki.” She is navigating a “labyrinth,” after all, her “suitcase’s wheels muddied / from an earlier rain in Heraklion,” wanting “to be stroked / moist with the Cretan sea.”
This is a collection of sensuous poems, which begins with Katerina up to her knees in oregano and lemon balm, on her birthday, in June, ecstatic beneath an eighty-foot walnut tree, breathing the breath of her grandmother and great grandmother. From there, which is somewhere in America (“on Baltimore Street”), Katerina— now grown— moves on to Greece, to the island of Crete, where sensuousness is literally embodied:
There’s so much song even in heartache and my heart the female
body after bird melody my simple request after
the seeded bread I’d bought at the base of Lasithi flavored
with orange rind. I am a Greek woman’s body
I was told in the marketplace after buying a potato and sea bream
the morning planes flew overhead celebrating Saint Minas when two
vendors said you are one of us The earthy.
The poet’s handling of grammar and syntax effects reverie at one moment, anecdote the next. Her experiences on Crete seem simultaneously magical and mundane. As Strisik discovers her name’s “ancient Greek form” (according to the appended Notes), she conveys the island’s essence as “dawn’s unfamiliar birdsong, church bells, even my blistered toes, cobblestones, the market’s gold coffee, bouquets of peach tulips, and the young man with angel blue eyes who sliced unfamiliar for me to sample, cheese, hard and salty.” A beautiful passage, whose verisimilitude depends upon keen observation of everyday Cretan life.
The aforementioned Notes enable Strisik to explain Greek vocabulary, as well as geographical names and artistic inspirations. Readers learn about the evil eye and about the poet’s debt to Constantine Cavafy, master of erotic verse. One noticeable omission, however, is Lasithi, where Katerina bought the seeded bread flavored with orange rind. A magnificent plain at the eastern end of Crete, Lasithi has mythological significance as the birthplace of Zeus. Its omission from the Notes is puzzling.
Few poems about Greece capture the dilemma of mortality as poignantly as John Keats’s “On Seeing the Elgin Marbles.” Not only its connection to that country but also the grammar of its title (preposition + gerund) came to mind as I read Strisik’s “Upon Seeing a Used Condom on the Ground.” Her choice of “Upon” is, arguably, more formal than his choice of “On,” which only amplifies the chasm between the poems’ subjects.
Not that I want to know who
ejaculated in the night on Navarinou, whose cylindrical
chute came close to my parked rental car
Strisik has her nerve. These are poems where Katerina is kissed by a goat, where a golden scruff of a dog rips apart her thigh, where the horse pisses in the desolate field, and where her inner thighs, pulp, back of neck heat with the thought of him.
Katerina’s reveries occur at a moment’s notice, not only on a walk towards ancient Knossos but also in the Xanthi Hair Lounge or the Thessaloniki Bus Terminal. Though her voice is sometimes vague and inscrutable (“my unpredictable want in its pose of yes” / “my impossible tranquility”), these poems cohere nonetheless, presenting the evolution of a woman’s proper name, with all its fantastic ingredients: ancestral villages in Macedonia, the defecation of eggplant sandwiches, an Ottoman house, wet breasts held under the eyes of Thalassa. With empty parentheses and disjointed paragraphs along the way, Goat, Goddess, Moon delivers many a “moment of shuddering in Crete,” amid cats’ yowls, woman’s cycles, the plum wine, the quake’s aftermath.
O Heraklion,
this is about
myself. Adrift.
*Dan Chiasson on James Schuyler, The New Yorker, 8.4.2025
Douglas Babington is a Montreal-based writer whose publications include poetry, prose, fiction, and essays. For many years he directed a writing center at Queen’s University in Ontario, where he also taught American literature. His most recent book is a translation, from Modern Greek into English, of Alexandra Bakonika’s Tragedy and the Den of the Senses (Athens: Alfeios Editions, 2020). He recently completed the writing of an historical novel, The Mail-Boat Crossing: An Irish Assassin and His War Poems, set in the summer of 1922 during Ireland’s civil war.