Ghost Oracle

Douglas Burnet Smith’s poems transform echoes of history and myth into moments of insight, bringing the ancient and contemporary worlds of Greece into vivid, often surreal collision

In Ghost Oracle, a Santorini “dream reader” slices open the poet’s palm with a thorn and analyzes the blood pattern; Athenian subways rattle under the Acropolis as protesters are teargassed in the streets; hooded specters rise out of a blaze of poppies at a café beside a 3,000 year-old cult site. From sun-drenched islands in the Aegean to remote mountain hideaways where hawks soar overhead and love goes astray, Smith's poems are alive with the sounds of haunted ruins and the spell of history.

The classics are considered with an ear for the vernacular, for how Plato and Aristotle might behave today, and what they would make of the so-called death of poetry. There are haunting pronouncements by the titular ghost oracle plus dramatic monologues by Xeno (who loses his member to the frost) and Du Fu, the eighth-century Chinese poet (during a visit to the Acropolis), as they confront the wonders and horrors of our world.

By turns sensuous, darkly comic, and spellbindingly lucid, this collection of poetry aspires to music—a music that rings as true as the fragments of Sappho and the epics of Homer.