Poets don’t lay around in leafy glades waiting for inspiration to flutter from the treetops.
At least, that’s not the m.o. of Gail Holst-Warhaft, who gave a reading Sunday at Morristown’s Macculloch Hall and Historical Museum.
To call Gail a poet only captures part of her story, which began in Australia and moved to Greece, where she was a journalist and played harpsichord for some top orchestras. Now she teaches Greek literature at Cornell University and seeks solutions to water shortages that plague the Mediterranean region.
Her first poetry collection, Penelope’s Confession (2007), examines the saga of Penelope through the lens of the modern Iraq War. Penelope is one of the few women portrayed favorably in Homer’s Odyssey, which describes her long and faithful wait for husband Odysseus to return from the Trojan War.
Gail said the Iraq War prompted her to wonder about all the women waiting for their men to come home. In this video clip she reads her poem Unravel. It was part of Macculloch Hall’s Poets in the Garden series, now in its 14th year. Poet John McDermott of Cranford also recited some of his works.
The series is funded by the Arts Council of the Morris Area.
