Searching for Sappho: The Lost Songs and World of the First Woman Poet

Classics professor and novelist Freeman (Sacrifice: A Celtic Adventure) expertly reconstructs the remarkable background of Sappho, the “first and greatest of the women poets in the ancient world,” from slender and fragmentary evidence. With deep and careful consideration, Freeman pieces together the surviving information about Sappho’s life, using classical literature, myth, and visual art to chisel a peephole into the lives of ancient Greek women. Freeman ably maps the political, spiritual, and cultural territory of ancient Greece while deftly mining Sappho’s poetry for insights into the passages of childhood and aging, marriage and motherhood, and desire and exile as they might have been experienced by “this woman who stands at the beginning of history.” Freeman’s portrait of this legendary woman responsible for “some of the greatest poetry the human heart has ever composed” is vivid and immediate, though necessarily incomplete. His translations of the nearly 200 existing Sapphic poems and fragments reveal a haunting music that’s bound to enchant lovers of poetry, history, and the classical world. Agent: Joelle Delbourgo, Joelle Delbourgo Associates. (Feb.)