PositiveThe Los Angeles Review of Books\'Tell me about a complicated man.\' So this new Odyssey begins ... this single verse introduces both her take on the work’s hero and a poetics of reduction that she observes rather ruthlessly in order to make a poem that matches Homer’s line for line ... The result is a lean, wiry Homer, shorn of his more ornamental features. In this she is consistent, even to a fault ... to her credit Wilson knows how to craft her lines in the most flexible way, including a number of those ridiculously named \'feminine\' endings ... The result pitches between the ancient and modern as any translation must if it chooses to pursue the vitality of storytelling over the archeology of poetic form ... Wilson strives quietly at moments for striking imagery ... when she faces the dilemma of Homer’s formulaic lines, part of the repetitive boilerplate of traditional poetic diction ... This lyricization of epic may restore the poetry through the backdoor, but it reveals the tension between Homeric and modern notions of poetry ... Her poem has the stamp of a clear and consistent vision, and brings Odysseus home to us again—cunning, eloquent, murderous; in sum, complicated.
