The Antigone Poems book review

The Antigone Poems by Marie Slaight
My rating: 1 of 5 stars

I was very excited to receive this book on my Kindle from Net Galley, as I very much love the Sophocles plays. I have to say though, I really didn't much care for it. I have read Antigone, but it has been a long while since, so I don't know if having the play fresh in my mind would make a difference or not? But I keep thinking that for it to be considered well written, one shouldn't need to know Antigone at all, for it to be a stand alone piece of work. The poetry itself is very gothic like to me, dark, and I had a lot of trouble even fully getting what each poem was about, basically because it was written a lot different than poetry I am use to reading. There were chapters, which I didn't get, as there wasn't that many poems to need to divide into chapters, let alone the actual common theme amongst the poems under each chapter were not clear for me. The poems didn't have names, but were numbered, and the numbers didn't make sense either. The poems went up to ridiculous roman numerals, skipping many between poems. It made me wonder if I really had a full copy? It really just didn't make sense how they were numbered. There was also a weird font thing going on in my digital copy, where there was a space within words after the letter "f". I get it is a typo, but it almost seemed intentional, as it was only when specific letters followed the letter "f". It really made it hard to read, and I wonder how much that affected my ability to appreciate the poems more. I did, however, love the illustrations within the book, which I understand to be chalk drawings. They are very interesting, a distinct artistic style that will have you going back through the book just to stare at the images longer. I think the artist should create more of these chalk drawings and put together a book of them!

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