The Sunday Poem today is "Myth" by Natasha Trethewey, which is read by the poet herself in an audio recording on the Poetry Foundation website. As Trethewey explains in her introduction, this astonishing poem, written as a palindrome, combines the myth of Orpheus' journey to the underworld in search of Eurydice with the poet's own vital dreams about her deceased mother.
Trethewey's 2000 collection, Domestic Work, won the inaugural Cave Canem Poetry Prize for best first book of poetry by an African American poet, the 2001 Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Book Prize, and the 2001 Lillian Smith Award for Poetry. Her 2006 collection, Native Guard, received the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. She has been published in numerous journals and anthologies, including The American Poetry Review, The Best American Poetry, and The Southern Review. Trethewey is currently a Professor of English at Emory University, where she holds the Phillis Wheatley Distinguished Chair in Poetry.
You can hear and see more of Trethewey discussing and reading her work here and here (scroll down to see the many options).
*The art above is "Orpheus and Eurydice" by George Frederick Watts.
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