| Summary: | This chapter examines two recent poetic responses to Homeric epic: Alice Oswald’s reworking of the Iliad in Memorial (2011) and Barbara Köhler’s cycle of Odyssey poems, Niemands Frau (2007), identifying their shared interest in dissolving the Homeric epic narrative line in favour of a gender-inflected preferment of the lyric dynamic. Epic narrative form is posited, via Horkheimer and Adorno’s reading of the Odyssey, as a correlate of the heroic masculinity it produces. It is contrasted with the lyric poem’s spatial or, in performance, sonic arena (in Köhler’s terminology, Areal) traversed by multiple possibilities of meaning: how meaning is derived from the Areal in any given reading is predicated, according to a model derived from Sappho’s ode to Anactoria, on ‘what moves us to love’. Köhler’s and Oswald’s poems emphasize not so much the heroic storyline as the verbal links and echoes across the poems that enable dynamic imaginative connections.
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