Not only did Robin Schultz, a Norman small press publisher, issue the first editions of Realization and Engendering, he chauffeured MM about as he was collecting material for half of the next book in the sequence, sonnets about Oklahoma City (my birthplace, to which, like MM and Robin, I often return). Her’s second half is set on the other side of the world, where its sonnets in prose describe Angkor Wat. Designed as an epitome of the Sentence, this crucial book looks forward to Life, another opportunity to summarize the epic. By turning SEMREH into HERMES Her initiates a more localized version of the larger retrograde reading of the Sentence. Though the great Cambodian temple reposes majestically, Morrison, following the scholar Eleanor Mannikka, has written about it by moving through its resplendent, sacred spaces, which for the Khmers had epitomized a divinely ritual world not altogether unlike Sentence of the Gods. MM’s full, complicated and vivid book contains many original elements, from the importation of further epitomized Shields of Achilles and Aeneas to innovation in sonnetry. The opening “crown of sonnets” initiates a narrative, as though in a parody of the Theogony. Homeric in their comic treatment of the gods, they nonetheless derive even more of their spirit and detail from Hesiod’s perennially popular account of divine origins.
