Death of Persephone: A Murder is a murder mystery in verse. It is set in the present day. Early on the omniscient narrator introduces us to hard-boiled detective: D.I. Boca, who for a decade, has been investigating serial murders of women in which the killer leaves white paper flowers on the corpse, and scrawls the symbol of a snake at each scene. But the story is as ancient as the original Greek myth about Hades kidnapping Demeter’s daughter Persephone (Steph, in this version of the story), to live with him in his subterranean kingdom. The story is as ancient and ongoing as femicide. Intimate partner violence has been described as an epidemic. According to Statistics Canada, more than 4 in 10 women have experienced some form of intimate partner violence in their lifetimes. And according to the Canadian Women’s Foundation, one woman or girl is killed every 48 hours. The main characters of Yvonne Blomer’s contemporary narrative demonstrate the ancient Greek literary devices pathos, hubris and perhaps even hamartia (a tragic flaw), though the latter is debatable.

Child Steph doesn’t know she was kidnapped. In “Descendent,” hop-skipping Steph plays innocently in the city. Is her innocence her hamartia? Steph has grown up with her Uncle H., who runs a souvlaki shop. The author mentions Montréal in her Acknowledgements as the model for her narrative’s setting, and the subterranean kingdom—the dark tunnels of the Métro—hint at the killer’s unconscious. Steph is unaware that Uncle H. took her from her mother and lied to Steph about her being abandoned, but as she grows up she begins to resent his efforts to control her: he refuses to let her carve the spitted lamb in his shop where she works after school, and buys her a dress she doesn’t like.

While studying in a university arts program, Steph wanders the city confidently. In the poem “A Stranger Calls,” she encounters Helios—come to warn her like the original guardian of oaths and god of sight—and Thea—a muralist intent on covering the snake at each crime scene with images of Hecate: goddess of magic, witchcraft, and the moon. Helios tries to protect Steph by telling her the truth about her Uncle H. In the poem titled “Thea,” she and Steph become friends. Thea’s muscular, tattooed arms, her independent artist life appeal to Steph. Thea is “the witch. / She is the ghost seer: / She is triple goddess… She is the watcher…” and she sees everything. Yet Steph is unsure about accepting the truth Thea and Helios speak about her Uncle H. Can their efforts keep Steph safe?

In the poem “Police Station,” Steph decides to visit the station to ask whether her Uncle H. has a police record. She learns he “did jail time, child porn.” She learns Uncle H. is a “person of interest” in the serial murders of young women being investigated by D.I. Boca, but the detective doesn’t ask her to give a statement on the spot, suggesting she return to do that. And she leaves, finally persuaded that she must get away from Uncle H. And she can. Is Steph’s naivety her fatal flaw? Or did the detective make a fatal mistake? The speaker regularly returns us to ancient Greece to remind us of her tale’s ancient roots and how long women have been vulnerable.

In “Corridor” Persephone is the “Iconic girl.” Violence is “expected. / History on repeat.” The speaker evokes the original Persephone of “corn, wheat, olives / the Mediterranean comes to mind. Ancient stone acropolis, / gods fixed in place and time. // Where the Persephone … / goddess of fertile trees, blue bead lily, chokecherry, cloudberry? Gods / or totems, the maiden // taken // is not just in our imagination.”

With the reference to “the maiden taken” the speaker could also be alluding to Canada’s missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls in this poem: “Walking home, this highway of—a corridor of vanished beings. Violence / an erasure of earth and what is fertile.”

In the poem “The City, 2,” the speaker’s evocation of missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls is taken further: “A city is ancient. Indigenous. / Waterways, deep ghosting / creeks and rivers. Damned…” The “streaked night where car headlights / mark the terrain in red smears / and ghostly diving shapes.” The vulnerability of all women in urban landscapes is emphasized in “The City, 1,” “Fear is a city in every woman.”

In “Stephanie at the Museum of Fine Art” images of “three witches” pull Steph “into the room… dark sky, / caged woman feeding a caged moon… Uncle H. / the never-sated moon.” I will not reveal Steph’s fate. In her notes, the author shares a quote she returned to throughout her writing of Death of Persephone: A Murder: “to what extent do we create these stories, and to what extent do they create us?” ¹ Are we prisoners of our mythology, our impulses and vulnerability? I recommend reading Yvonne Blomer’s wonderful novel in verse to seek answers to all the important questions it raises.

1. ↩︎

Michael Bazzett. “Why We Need to Revisit Old Myths to Create New Ones.” Lit Hub, January 27, 2022.