Ann Deagon first began writing poetry "vigorously" in 1970, "in some kind of forty-year-old renaissance." Since then her poems have been published widely and have been received numerous awards.
"When I came to forty
that three-headed dog love death and poetry
took me in its teeth and shook me . . . "
Carbon 14 is the result, a counterpoint of serious and ironic excavations into the mythic and the personal past of a middle-aged woman. Although these poems have grown from her lifelong involvement in the Classics and are basically classical in their structure and concentration, their strength is not academic.
Ann Deagon's poems interweave past and present, person, place, and event, with unexpected and often violent insights. In "The Sybil's Bath," for example, the sacrifice of a young girls to a god leads to unprecedented counterviolence and to questions which are both contemporary and absolute.
According to Deagon, "All identity is in some sense a translation from the Greek: it cannot be defined except with hyphens. The meaning hovers precisely at the hyphen." in Carbon 14 Deagon proclaims her identity as poet-woman, woman-teacher, teacher-poet.
"When I came to forty
that three-headed dog love death and poetry
took me in its teeth and shook me . . . "
Carbon 14 is the result, a counterpoint of serious and ironic excavations into the mythic and the personal past of a middle-aged woman. Although these poems have grown from her lifelong involvement in the Classics and are basically classical in their structure and concentration, their strength is not academic.
Ann Deagon's poems interweave past and present, person, place, and event, with unexpected and often violent insights. In "The Sybil's Bath," for example, the sacrifice of a young girls to a god leads to unprecedented counterviolence and to questions which are both contemporary and absolute.
According to Deagon, "All identity is in some sense a translation from the Greek: it cannot be defined except with hyphens. The meaning hovers precisely at the hyphen." in Carbon 14 Deagon proclaims her identity as poet-woman, woman-teacher, teacher-poet.
Ann Deagon's voice is original and strong, learned and full of vitality and present experience. The only way to be learned. Her poems break out of the usual categories (the ones we are all bored with) and I'm grateful for that. Her book proves that a poet can command academic knowledge and still be intensely rooted in the mire of the everyday: that blood and guts need not be wireless.'—Anne Halley
'These poems by Ann Deagon possess the strength and authority of experience richly felt and thoughtfully understood. They rise out of biological growth and frailty and into the imperishable resonances of history and myth. She has at her command more than common resources for a poet: wit, intelligence, unnerving candor, a cool and knowing way with words. Having only just entered the field, she is already a figure to be reckoned with.'—Anthony Hecht
Ann Deagon teaches Classsics at Guilford College in Greensboro, North Carolina.
