In June the Labyrinth

In June the Labyrinth, Cynthia Hogue’s ninth collection of poems, is a book-length serial poem in four untitled sections, which together tell a mythic story that is part pilgrimage, part elegy. Its central trope is the figure of the labyrinth, which predates Christianity but also, strikingly, survived Christianity to be incorporated as a symbol of life into some of the great Gothic cathedrals of Europe. Hogue began visiting one of those cathedrals, Chartres, the summer her mother would die. She visited one afternoon when the great labyrinth of Chartres was uncovered and found herself walking it, after which she (lapsed Lutheran, failed Buddhist) lit a candle to the Black Madonna. The character of the dying woman at the heart of Labyrinth, Elle, is thus rooted in Hogue’s personal experience of loss, but as the losses multiplied over years, Elle became a composite resembling no one person but only herself. The series plays a good deal with shifting pronouns, but largely, the “I” locates this work, as it must be, in the personal lyric of love and loss.

The book as a whole travels a trans-historical and trans-geographical terrain, on a quest of sorts, investigating not only the “labyrinth” as myth and symbol, but something akin to the “labyrinth of the broken heart.” Surprisingly, the narrator discovers that at the heart of Elle’s individual story is the earnest female pilgrim’s journey, full of disappointment but also hard-won wisdom and courage, although the poems do not put it this way so directly. Rather, they distill, fracture, recompose, tell partially—literally in parts but also in loving detail—the story of a life.