Eurydice Speaks is a linked sonnet series echoing voices that emerge from the Underworld.
A contemporary Eurydice uses the power of language to process her constraints and losses, reflected in strategies of transformation which reveal the dynamic between iteration and change.
Fragments of being and transitory insights, like broken pieces of mirror within the architecture of the sonnet, reflect and distort, to deepen, intensify and reinforce connectivity.
Eurydice Speaks illustrates the evocative, associative and allusive power in the methods of poetry, to know and be known, to feel and be felt, to gather and cohere.
Praise for Eurydice Speaks
…it’s not just haiku-esque images that make Gaskin’s work distinct – it’s how she blends the images with surrealism and abstractions. At the crux of it, this how she evokes, artfully juxtaposing disparate lines to surprise and allude…
Ultimately, Gaskin serves to make voice uncontainable by giving emotion and intuition the centre stage, subverting logic and patriarchal thinking.
– Lesh Karan, Mascara Literary Review (Read full review)
Antigone is the emblematic heroic female who rejects structures of authority that would silence her. In Ismene’s Survivable Resistance, Claire Gaskin focuses on Antigone’s sister and In Eurydice Speaks the Greek myth is revitalised, politically repositioning our protagonist as the agent in her own story. Eurydice is re-cast as quietly knowing, robust and steadfast.
– Alison J Barton, Rabbit 34: REPORTAGE (Read full review)
These sonnets also provide a compelling line that is repeated without one word changed:
‘the only crime where the judicial narrative is of the victim’
This is a timely, aphoristic line given the countless women, sexually assaulted, and retraumatised by the court system, if they are brave enough to speak their truth.
– Angela Costi, Australian Poetry Journal 11.2 (Read full review)
Claire Gaskin Poetry 