John Reibetanz – författare

For a change Orpheus / listens to the other / musicians once the hum / of his lyre no longer / hangs like moss from branches / in the forest airIn New Songs for OrpheusJohn Reibetanz updates Ovid’s poetry. Ovid’s words showed him to be a person of deep empathy for natural, animal, and human worlds, and so Reibetanz posits that the Roman writer would likely be eager to take account of all that we have learned about them in the past two thousand years.Ovid would be familiar with recent discoveries about the complex inner lives and societies of non-human animals, and about the intricate interrelationships sustained in forests. The poems in New Songs for Orpheus look at and listen to the real creatures into which Ovid’s characters were transformed, acts viewed not as punishment or deprivation, but as a release into other intriguing forms of life. In the human realm, he might find a suitably cataclysmic counterpart to the Trojan War in the barbarities and sacrifices of World War II, or perhaps see an analogue to the Fall of Troy in the fall of the Two Towers in September 2001.The songs Orpheus sings then transform into more contemporary shapes, as characters and incidents from the Canadian musical Come from Away – like those in Ovid’s “restored” world after the flood – are celebrated in a reaffirmation of community after the divisive horrors of 9/11. In all these times and places, metamorphosis brings new meaning into a life, be it human, plant, or animal.

When he first hiked the Don Valley trails / all he heard was river as he strode / beside its glitter of smashing glassGrounded in the local and immediate – from Toronto’s rivers and ravines to its highways and skyscrapers – Metromorphoses explores some of the radical changes that have taken place in the city during the course of its history.The collection’s poems focus, in roughly chronological order, on the city’s inhabitants and the changing relationships between people and place, from the original Indigenous presence, through the immigrants of the nineteenth century and the Depression and war survivors of the twentieth century, to the twenty-first century’s setbacks and affirmations. We encounter characters such as Symphony Pete, who whistled classical music while hiking Don Valley trails, Henry “Box” Brown, who escaped from southern slavery in a packing crate, or the exhausted anonymous newsboy a photographer caught fast asleep next to his stack of newspapers on a flight of stone steps. We zoom in like time-lapse photography on the changes that a single site has experienced, from wood-frame cottages to foundry to synagogue to furniture store to parking lot to the new provincial courthouse.These poems bring the reader closer to the impulses that drove the art of the Mississaugas, the escape from slavery or famine of new settlers, or the social awareness of a Dr Charles Hastings or a Raymond Moriyama. Far from Eliot’s “unreal city,” Metromorphoses takes us into the heart of the real Toronto, alive and ever-changing.

The dramatic traditions and conventions available to Shakespeare at the time he wrote King Lear were so rich and varied as to constitute an extremely resonant and complex vocabulary, one that Shakespeare fully utilized to shape his audience's response and to create the unique world of this play. Professor Reibetanz argues that many of the qualities that set Lear apart from Shakespeare's other tragedies are those it shares with Jacobean drama rather than with earlier Elizabethan drama. The tightly enclosed world of the play, operating within an internal logic independent of the real world, reflects a structure, to cultivate sheer virtuosity of technique, however, Shakespeare used it to reinforce a profound, archetypal emotional experience, an effect more characteristic of Greek than of Jacobean tragedy. Shakespeare's use of popular Elizabethan conventions of character definition similarly conveys the elemental quality of a play-world detached from ordinary reality. Yet Shakespeare adopts the conventions not to catapult his characters into the abstract and theoretical world of earlier drama but to apply the power of that world to an essentially human experience. The play asserts, structurally and thematically, the dominance of feeling above form.The Lear World reflects the depth and eclecticism of Shakespeare's use of dramatic traditions, and deepens our understanding of a compelling and powerful tragedy.