Bookshop Talk: The Venus Year
Event WebsiteEvery nineteen months, Venus circles Earth, changing from morning star to evening star and back again. Some say the Sumerian myth of Inanna’s descent into the underworld and ascent out of it again, riding the crescent moon, is a map of the star’s celestial cycle.
Sylvia V Linsteadt’s new collection, ‘The Venus Year’, is the almanac of one Venus year in her own life. A year of loss and of gifts; a year of transformation, spent between the Greek island of Crete and her home in California. It is at once memoir and myth, monthly seasonal notes and glimpses of daily life, and the poems and short stories that came from those days.
In these pages, the mythic princess Andromeda becomes a starry dragon, while Europa rides her white bull across the Aegean. Narcissus is born from a bulb. Kalliope and Calypso tell their own stories. A heart-broken woman falls between worlds and lands in a garden. She carries clay lamps into darkness, harvests olives, and monitors a dying beehive. She grieves, and births, and is born.
Join Sylvia for an evening discussion of her travels in Crete and a reading from The Venus Year.
