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Ancient Voices
By Kate Hovey
Illustrations by Murray Kimber
Simon and Schuster/Margaret K. McElderry Books, 2004. 38 pages.
Reviewed by Christy Risser-Milne.
Not all picture books are exclusively for children, and Ancient Voices is most certainly one of them. Children who have been exposed to poetry and the stories of the ancient gods of Greece will find themselves caught up in Kate Hovey’s lyrical renditions of their exploits. Adults who appreciate good, solid poetry that engages all of the senses will find that some of Hovey’s lines transcend the ancient stories and live in our world still today.
Choosing some of the lesser myths and characters within them, Hovey finds pain and joy and love and hatred rife in the life and loves of the gods. Giving voice to the cupbearer of the gods, Ganymede, we find a human pressed into an unwilling servitude to these vain and selfish deities.
When night falls on Olympus,
my spirit’s free to roam
above the moonlit treetops
far away -- home.
But as beautiful as the sound of Hovey’s poetry is, it would be far less were it not accompanied by Murray Kimber’s artwork. Filling out the pages with images both familiar and fantastical, Kimber emboldens the stories Hovey tells us.
Sometimes anachronistically modern, other times brilliantly ancient, Kimber pushes readers beyond the words themselves into a realm of sights, sounds, and tastes that one rarely experiences from poetry alone.
While it is clear that knowing the myths behind both the art and the poetry will aid in further appreciating this book (for example, the oblique visual reference to a motorcycle-
riding Aries as he appears in the television show Xena: Warrior Princess, and the uncanny resemblance of Hades to nineteenth-century depictions of Mr. Hyde from Robert Louis Stevenson’s classic book), I wonder what someone completely unfamiliar with the stories would think of it.
Filled with action, story, and lyric musicality, Ancient Voices is a beautiful means of communicating some of the deeper truths present in the stories of the gods long consigned to myth.
Christy Risser-Milne is a freelance writer and photographer living in Boston, Massachusetts.
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