Bearing the Body of Hector Home

Bearing the Body of Hector Home is the story of how King Priam of Troy fetched his son's corpse from the grief-striken, vengeance-mad Achilles, the subsequent preparations for and completion of Hector's funeral rites. The collection consists of a series of dramatic monologues from the points of view of Greek and Trojan warriors and also the citizens of Troy, that besieged, doomed city. Poems show us the grieving of King Priam and Queen Hecuba, the cynical takes of Paris and Helen (who caused the War), and the reactions of a gallery of Troy's ordinary subjects: wood cutters, prostitutes, butchers, tavern owners, beggars, pickpockets, tax collectors, security men, deserters-the whole panoply of Trojan society. The collection ends with Hector speaking one last time, bidding the only life he'll ever know goodbye