The Black Car

(2011)

In Greek mythology, Lethe was one of the five rivers of Hades that flowed around the cave of Hypnos and through the underworld. The ancient Greeks believed that souls were made to drink from the river before being reincarnated, so they would not remember their past lives. All those who drank from it experienced complete forgetfulness.

In writing about her 1959 camping trip across Canada and the United States with her husband, poet Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath first mentions the fabled river in her poem "Two Campers in Cloud Country (Rock Lake, Canada)," while also making reference to Lethe again in her poem “Crossing the Water,” in which she directly names Canada as “two black, cut-paper people” cross a black lake in a black boat while “cold worlds shake from the oar." Plath again revisited Lethe in two later poems, including “Amnesiac” and “Getting There,” where Plath likens the "gigantic gorilla interior" of the river to a train car  — "a black car" — that she emerges from, fresh as a newborn baby. In all her poems, Lethe is used as a repeating motif by Plath and as a potent source of life, death, and rebirth.

Inspired while doing archival research in the Plath archives at Smith College and Indiana University, The Black Car is part of a larger finished manuscript that contends with Plath and Hughes’ trip to Canada. Others are simply meditations on forgetting, and visit other poets’ work on the subject of Lethe, including poems by Edna St. Vincent Millay, H.D., and Charles Baudelaire.

Printed by Baseline Press
36 pp., thread bound, 5"x7"
Cover of St. Armand Canal paper
Flyleaf of Tibetan Cloud

Limited edition of 75 copies

View the chapbook here.

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