The Cave of the Bear
by Joy E. Stocke
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THE CAVE OF THE BEAR
by Joy E. Stocke
“Can you name your thirst?” asks the headnote in The Cave of the Bear, and in the poems that follow,
thirst, taste, texture and color lead the speaker as she journeys through the island of Crete, separated from her family,
on an adult quest into the Eleusinian Mysteries. Wife and mother, she cannot descend into the underworld as an innocent,
a virgin, as Persephone did, yet she can descend as an initiate, as one in whom “something wild rises up,”
and she herself can rise, through these poems, to give her young daughter a sketchy map of the journey she may someday take.
This is the deep imaginative enterprise of The Cave of the Bear to envision a way a contemporary woman might live
out the Demeter/Persephone relationship, not as a mother begging the gods for a daughter’s return, but as a woman seeking
the depths of underlying her life... Thus the speaker is both Demeter/Persephone, mother/virgin fully united with the
girlchild so neglected by the patriarchal thrust of Greek myth “a child on a Wednesday of ashesÉmore than dust...
also the sea.”
“In the first part of a trilogy, Joy Stocke and Lili Bita have given a beautiful rendering of Joy’s journey to
the Cave of the Bear on the Isle of Crete.
May Joy’s magnificent poetic rendering of this pilgrimage orient you, as well to your own deep awakening to the sacred
ground of your being.”
— Gisella Behrens
C. G. Jung Center
PRODUCT DETAILS
Paperback: 87 pages
Dimensions: 0.2" x 5.8" x 8.5"
Publisher: Pella Pub Co (July 1999)
ISBN: 0918618746
Price: $12.00
Shipping: $4.00
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