Far Roamed Leto in Travail To See If Any Land Would Be a Dwelling for Her Child

Publication Instance Details #3208

Publication Overview

Translation	Is Multilingual	Explicit Irish Context?	Ekphrasis	Has Paratext?	Reference to News, Media or Technology
No	No	No	Yes	Yes	No

Details

Human Rights Issues	Displacement/Forced Migration Gender-based violence Health Poverty/Deprivation/Lack of Sustenance
Languages	English
Genre	Long (narrative) Poem
Medium	Print Collection
Paratext Text	for Jacky
Notes	The lines deal with abortion and poverty. The speaker follows the modern journey of an unmarried pregnant woman named Leto- the mythical figure and mother of Apollo and Artemis- who goes to Paris and then to London in order to have an abortion. She lives in poverty and is compared to the Russian dancer Nijinsky who was diagnosed with schizophrenia. Intertextual references to Beckett's Malone Dies, Jacques Prevert, Juan Miro, and Dick Whittington are interweaved with classical references from Greek antiquity to make larger claims about women, mental health, women's reproductive rights, religious morality, and social inequality.