Daedalus Had a Daughter

We all know what happened to Icarus, but what if there was one who lived to tell the tale? Wanda Campbell’s fourth collection of poetry offers alternatives to flying too close to the sun and sinking into the sea. Beginning with ekphrastic poems responding to works by female artists such as Emily Carr and Frida Kahlo, Campbell considers the ways the love of art and the art of love help us to transcend the labyrinths of our lives. In the margins where men and women meet, navigation can be both difficult and dazzling. Viewed through the lens of the poet’s own experience as the mother of three daughters, the lives of girls and women become poems about the common magic of coming of age. Her mother’s own search for her birth mother while battling breast cancer emerges as suite structured around the meanings of haw and thorn, the two halves of the name she left behind. In a section that moves from the free verse that dominates the collection to sonnets and other experiments with form, female pioneers in the worlds of flight and literature are celebrated in plain but powerful language. The poet draws on figures as various as artist Maud Lewis and journalist Maziar Bahari to argue that no matter how hard things become, art creates hope.