After Beowulf

Nicole Markotić

• Publisher: Coach House Books
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781552454428
• eBook ISBN: 9781770567146
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Ancient Poetry
• Index: Literature

CBC BOOKS BEST CANADIAN POETRY BOOKS OF 2022

LONGLISTED FOR THE RAYMOND SOUSTER AWARD

hwæt, another Beowulf translation? Not exactly…

Welcome to Denmark's Heorot Hall, where King Hrothgar invites to his banquet table everyone but Grendel, Saxon's cradle-made monster. Dissing this ur-outsider initiates a predictable and monstrous backlash, a Mediæval fracas that only the eponymous Beowulf can quash. Sailing across the whaleroads, he arrives to "quell and queltch and quatch the Grendel beast."

Beowulf, that still-recognizable hero, embodies a "blank" function, a motive-driven yet motiveless megastar. He's the young, fit, male, self-sacrificing protagonist-interloper who will fight any monster to protect his people. Or to defend strangers. Or to gain a reputation. Or because he just really wants to…

In her rendering of Beowulf, Nicole Markoti? offers a rollicking cover song of fantastical text. These pages will surprise readers as they introduce new ways to embrace, challenge, or click with Anglo-Saxon heroics. Writing original poems, Markoti? de-stories the story of one man, who mostly does not play well with others, who fights monsters (and defeats their mothers, too), and who practically invents the poetic tradition of entitled bravery

Upending the tale with her fresh and enchanting style, Markoti? gives a nod to previous translations, winks at canonical critics, bares historical biases, all while gifting transmogrifying pages that will whet your whimsy!

"Nicole Markoti? takes the original English-language epic and reprocesses it. That is, she rereads, rewrites, reimagines, rethinks, and retells it, all at the same time. The result is the story re-understood. The phrasing and incantation is Markoti?'s own (and our era's own), deployed with deliciously textured and diverse registers of language. Blake saw infinity in the palm of his hand. Markoti? puts a millennium in yours." —Wayde Compton, author of The Outer Harbour

"Beowulf, with its unfathomable monsters and monster-slaying hero, its bro world of mead, boasting, weapons, and booty, remains a stubbornly relevant template for much of our contemporary scene. Nicole Markoti?'s After Beowulf handles all this with dazzling sprezzatura. It is a pleasure to follow the narrating, condensing, commenting voice as it sashays through a range of verbal registers from high Olsonic to comic book pratfall, snark to scholarship. After Beowulf provides an up-to-date reading of Beowulf through the eyes of a feminist poet. And it continually suggests what things might be like after Beowulf." —Bob Perelman, author of Jack and Jill in Troy

"The collision of ancient and colloquial language creates bursts of humour as my dude Beowulf makes his way into the banquet hall and beyond. Linger here to experience the aesthetics of poetry in action: vibrant and intensely moving, we feel the wrenching pain of Grendel's mother. Markoti?'s language is thick with meaning and light with humour: a creation of the most projective of verses." —Jacqueline Turner, author of Flourish

Measure His Name

Then!

Begin

then, and then, and them.

All them begatting escorts

dusty exhaustion into that (f.)-tipped

(f.)-hall, HEOROT:

Begin (again) with the troll, the brute, the terror, then

tweet the deets of the Spear-Danes and their antiquity

exploits, while accolading the Almight.

Surely that rewrite erases, chases, clownsels

the woebegone Grendel?

Grendel, only named 102 lines deep

moon-stretched and woodland au-contraired, he

infuses wild artichokes, munches horse

chestnuts, outgrows the hemlock and yew trees, and

forlorns his buckeyed self.

Then, finally, commence:

neglect to invite that prehistoric godzilla

this tale’s pongy beast. Such

neglect entwines in a scriptured haunting, that

canonical overlook, so foreseeable

with ensuing narrative penalties.

See Genesis, esp. margin curlicues; check

out those olden-days folktales; read

about petrifying crones, snubbed by no party

invites.

The lack of an invite-script

jilted the raging varlet, Grendel, into a fairytale’s

doomed rubicon.

Drawn by minstrels, yet

denied entry into the hymns

no cameo in tribute chanting.

Host and herds embrace every basil leaf ’s low-branched unfurling

every formica ant climbing glass shoots

to await its cyclical vocation

every aloof octopus arm, still

cognating × infinity

foraging

every stringy snake-snack

everyone but Grendel, Saxon’s cradle-

monster.

Grendel! Son of grotesque

gone-daughter of Cain.

Or is he the gone-son who lunges

back and back and back, through

the father of father of gone-

father, looped to great-grampa Cain?

A kinship duplicating Grendel’s inborn

trade as proto-agonist

– and then, and then, and then –

make way for some trash-talk gatting,

chronicles inseminated by Origin-Tale curse:

goblins | fiends | gnomes | cretins |

giants | ettins | elves | trolls | imps | phantoms |

monstrosities | sprites | vermin | shapes of hell |

freaks

UR-hybrids, all.

Each line scop-ing his contronymic self:

heathen thing; biblical deterrent

poetic and scholarly constraint, beast

laden with porous couplets

nursery-rhyme jingles

and eerie intent.

So. Dusk hues Grendel toward

that pretty (f.)...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• The Epic Speaks
• Measure His Name
• Sequel: Payback
• Andropause
• Fortuna
• AfterWyrd
• Dramatis Personæ
• Notes and Acknowledgements
• About the Author