For a change Orpheus / listens to the other / musicians once the hum /
of his lyre no longer / hangs like moss from branches / in the forest
air In New Songs for OrpheusJohn Reibetanz updates Ovid's poetry. Ovid's
words showed him to be a person of deep empathy for natural, animal, and
human worlds, and so Reibetanz posits that the Roman writer would likely
be eager to take account of all that we have learned about them in the
past two thousand years. Ovid would be familiar with recent discoveries
about the complex inner lives and societies of non-human animals, and
about the intricate interrelationships sustained in forests. The poems
in New Songs for Orpheus look at and listen to the real creatures into
which Ovid's characters were transformed, acts viewed not as punishment
or deprivation, but as a release into other intriguing forms of life. In
the human realm, he might find a suitably cataclysmic counterpart to the
Trojan War in the barbarities and sacrifices of World War II, or perhaps
see an analogue to the Fall of Troy in the fall of the Two Towers in
September 2001. The songs Orpheus sings then transform into more
contemporary shapes, as characters and incidents from the Canadian
musical Come from Away - like those in Ovid's "restored" world after the
flood - are celebrated in a reaffirmation of community after the
divisive horrors of 9/11. In all these times and places, metamorphosis
brings new meaning into a life, be it human, plant, or animal.
