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The Magician of Avalon: Tales of Merlin and the Knights of the Round Table dir. by Stacy Klein (review)

Isolde, Morgan, Elaine ofAstolat, Nineve, Elaine ofCotbenic, and Guinevere. All but one ofthese sections contains a sequence ofpoems, each relaying a different reaction to a significant event or series of events in that specific chatactet's development. The women that emerge are powerfully aware of the complex and frequently problematic nature of their desires, making them compelling examples of the limitations ofboth the modern obsession with consciousness and the medieval institution ofchivalry— even in an idealized form. Male voices surface in several of the sequences, providing a welcome but perhaps slightly undet-developed counterpart to the predominately female perspective throughout. Lloyd's verse is frequently haunting—arresting even—and her recurrent use of Celtic wilderness imagery effectively functions as a reminder ofnot only the longing, but also the loneliness experienced by each of the characters we hear speak. Most of the individual natrations are, however, told from the viewpoint ofsomeone revisiting events of the past from a fixed point in the present, which makes it hard to trace any development of change in petsonal awareness among the characters presented. It is almost as if, having lived through the experiences they describe, each character becomes the omnipotent authority ofher or his own legend. As one might expect from a work based primarily on Malory, the majority of the poems in this collection relate either directly or indirectly to the Lancelot-Arthur-Guinevere triangle of conflicted loyalties. Given this backdrop and the author's self-proclaimed intention quoted above, it seems odd that there is only one poem in the Elaine ofAstolat sequence. It is, after all, the image ofElaine's dead body floating in a barge through Camelot that provokes one ofMalory's most significant commentaries on the complex nature of love. And yet, while there are inevitably many other traditionally silent voices that would benefit from inclusion in a collection like this one (Ector's wife and Brusen are two that immediately come to mind), Margaret Lloyd's explorations are well worth reading for anyone interested in how the Arthurian legend continues to grow.