When Southern Charm Meets With Ancient Civilization : DINNER WITH PERSEPHONE by Patricia Storace; Pantheon $25, 400 pages

According to Greek mythology, when Zeus gave his daughter Persephone to his brother Hades, ruler of the infernal regions, her mother Demeter, the goddess of vegetation, hit the roof. Hades carried Persephone down to hell, where she became the queen of the dead. Zeus persuaded Hades to allow Persephone to spend summers with her mother on Earth, and winters in hell (she might have spent more time with her mother if she hadn’t succumbed to temptation and eaten some pomegranate seeds). A reasonable deal for everyone but Persephone, who was much sought after, but torn, to say the least, between heaven and hell, between mother love and marriage, between the abundance of life on Earth and the power of death.

The split pomegranate on the cover of “Dinner with Persephone” is also, Patricia Storace explains, a symbol of ecstatic ambiguity, in dreams, a premonition of “pleasant erotic adventures, because it is a symbol of the return of spring and fertility,” but also “a sign that your life is in danger, that some underworld force may be reaching out to seize you, as Hades did Persephone.”

Between the myth and the symbol are all the ingredients of Storace’s year in Greece. And I think it is fair to say that Storace, a poet, born in Alabama, cuts a path through Greece and leaves a wake. She has that kind of burning intelligence, where curiosity is the propane, and sexual, sensual intensity is the by-product; in Greece she is much sought after.

Many people try to write about other cultures. They park in a place, buy a coffee machine and a typewriter or a villa and make a pursuit of observation. There is a predatory ring that is not to be found in this woman’s account of Greece.

Greece comes to Storace and lays itself at her feet. She bends down and whispers its own history in its ear and raises it up.

They are a perfect match, Storace and Greece. The overwhelming meaning given the smallest detail, the slightest turn of phrase, by the religious, literary, historical fervor of the place, is treated with respect and humor by this visitor; her hairdresser, named O Kyrios Emmanuel (who tells her that he is on his last incarnation, “so there is so little I have not seen”), and the traffic cop who says khronia polla, “many years to you” to a passerby.

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It is only her Southern charm that allows Storace to survive the onslaughts of Greek men, and these episodes, which punctate the book, vary in setting if not in tone.

There is the married Greek dry cleaner who charges Storace higher rates when she refuses to capitulate (“although there are certain kinds of men I find irresistible, my temptations don’t include married Greek dry cleaners”); the lonely taverna keeper in a small town who, when Storace tells him she has a bond elsewhere, replies, “What, a husband? . . . Then why not have two? Look how handsome I am”; and finally the publisher who chases Storace around his office, forcing her to apply “Anglo-Saxon-style martial arts, of which the basic underlying principle is to deny that anything has happened.”

Not so funny is the commonplace image, in Greek television, movies and books, of men beating their women, and their clinging relationships with their mothers.

“ ‘You are aware,’ ” a friend tells Storace, ‘that we have two verbs meaning ‘to love’? Now the standard explanation for this is to say that one has the nuance of to love with the heart, to give love, the other is to desire with the body, to want love. But I think we have two because when we fail at one, we can always claim we meant the other. Shall we walk back down slowly and have an ice cream?’ ”

Many times throughout her year Storace returns to what she calls “This most Greek sensation of simultaneity . . . of a world felt as desperately divided which struggles to hold itself together between past and present, man and woman, death and life, Christian and pagan, divine and human.”

This simultaneity, for Storace, gives Greece a surreal quality, a shimmer, “the changing boundaries of dream and reality can never be permanently fixed. . . .” Fortunately, Greece found in Storace a storyteller who would not attempt to rip the two apart, a lover who wanted to be friends and still preserve the romance.