Aggressive and evocative language dominates this first published poetry collection by rapper and playwright Kate Tempest (Brand New Ancients). Hold Your Own relates the story of the blind prophet Tiresias, his childhood transformation into a girl by the Greek goddess Hera, subsequent womanhood and eventual reversion to manhood. A pawn in a quarrel between Zeus and Hera, Tiresias and his wisdom earn the violent, destructive scorn of the goddess and a "gift" of prophecy from the King of the Gods.
Tiresias's multiple metamorphoses (read: maturation and intellectual growth) provide fertile ground as each section recounts one phase of the prophet's life while simultaneously reflecting on modern life, human dislocation and mortality. "She is glass/ Amongst sand," Tempest writes of the girl Tiresias, forged through an intensity of experience like the heat of lightning, at once a part of her surroundings yet always separate, hardened and hemmed in.
Particularly poignant poems explore the duality of youth: the twin promises of vigor and inevitable decline. The young, exuberant in their power and potential, yet longing to be old; the old, scorning the ignorance and shallowness of youth but jealous, nonetheless, of what has been lost. The poetry contains much sympathy for the plight of the prophet, and of all living things. The reader is reminded that "[b]ecause the boy will grow up/ makes him no less innocent." Senescence and death are the tragedies that await all of us, no matter how wise or how naive, whether male or female, and the journey to these inevitabilities is fraught with much suffering and confusion. --Evan M. Anderson, collection development librarian, Kirkendall Public Library, Ankeny, Iowa