Publication Date: April 2018.
Red Hen Press
Review by Ginny Short
Adrianne Kalfopoulou’s most
recent work is a collection of poetry that draws the reader into a disquieting
yet tender exploration of her adopted country and her father’s ancestry. She
moved to Greece as a young scholar and has loved, lived and raised a daughter
there. Becoming a part of this European world, but viewing it from afar as
well, this curious and sometimes precarious relationship provides an unusual
and intimate view into a country stricken by crippling hardship in the wake of
the financial crisis of the 2000’s that left no one untouched.
The poems are startling and
vivid, tender and brutal. The book is divided into three sections. Rather than
section titles Kalfopoulou underscores the groupings with epigrams that
foretell just how much of “too much” you will move through in that section.
Section One starts with a
quote from Tomas Transtromer’s work, “Further In.” We are warned: you will come
in further than what you would choose by design. In the opening poem
Kalfopoulou says, “After so much grief, the darkness has seeped into our
dreams.” Here she juxtaposes the beautiful with the baleful, the dream with the
waking. “Carpets of lavender from the Easter Trees, Paskalies/and their aroma cover our broken pavements,/our streets
where the homeless sleep.” What is real and what is dream? They overlap so
seamlessly in this poem that, like the poet, you can’t help but wonder.
The poems in this section
wander from the historical, to the present, mapping the ground of Greece’s
past: its conquerors, its resistances, its pride. From the extravagance of a
country groaning under the weight of its own richness (“There is too much here,
the sapphire, the thistle/the oregano blooms in June”) to the extravagance of its own passions (“Revolution
is a sacred word/in Greece, it means there are always ways to resist”) to the
rich color and feelings of its people (“She’s used to passionate disappointments,/too
used to them to care if you’ll love her or forget her.”) You want to flee, but
flee where? Kalfopoulou asks. We find
under her keen gaze that there is nowhere to flee.
The second section starts
with Italo Calvino asking “But how can we hope to save ourselves in that which
is most fragile?” Here we travel in to what is most brittle, starting with our own
thin and delicate skin, she explores the depth and translucence of our most
vulnerable selves. “My father is almost
tender as his skin turns the color of browned leaves” and “I would notice my
skin – the spotted browns of crusting leaves that marked my flesh like his…” Kalfopoulou
unapologetically displays her own vulnerability as she talks frankly about her
own difficult relationships of opposition with her father, her friends, lovers and
her country. And yet she also poises us at our most vulnerable moments, when
children grow, when lovers die, when countries can’t escape the memories of
things past. One of the most poignant poems in this section tells about a man
who missed a flight and his bewilderment, his lostness “is a kind of
premonition,” says Kalfopoulou. A sense of the loss of the things that help us,
hold us up, keep us moving, pervades. “The wound is an eye,/also a mouth,
always an opening.” Kalfopoulou says in the poem that ends this section. We are
left with the sense of deep longing, and a realization that whether people open
their purses or close their eyes, this generosity doesn’t ever really stop, but
it doesn’t really heal the wounds, either.
The final section starts
with a quote from Monica Sok’s “Nocturne:” World/throw it off then! Throw
it!/It doesn’t matter what covers you when the sky sleeps./In the light you are
a dangerous place.” The opening poems throws the doors wide to the tragedy
unfolding with the refugees that have amassed on Greek shores. I know that
Kalfopoulou has worked with these stricken groups to give succor to these human
souls, and her heartbreak shines like moonlight in this poem: Dust, fairytale
pollen, winds of the Sahara, dust coating the people like a weight, the “spring
at the end of fairytales.” Her chilling reminder at the end that “we forget
that Scheherazade began each Arabian Night to save her life.”
“Coming Down the Mountain
Before Dark” reminds us that we can journey as fast as we want to get to where
we think we are going, but “how unexpectedly all falls to dark” but despite the
thrill, the adrenaline, “the threat, like sex/and felt a sudden thrill,
remembered/a praying mantis, the bee it caught/inside a blossom’s heart – it
ate with such intent,/consumed the body till there was nothing left:” a wise
warning of our own complexities.
The penultimate poem is a
series of micro-vignettes of a country in turmoil. Should you buy toilet paper
or olives? The cicadas still sing, people still complain and life goes on.
Woven in between the grocery store and the lines at the bank is a micro story
of a girl writing a story of her mother’s rape and murder. You can’t help but
wonder if maybe rape is something other than what it appears to be. “Grief,”
Kalfopoulou says, “will keep you reaching back/for what is not there.”
This is a wonderful,
luminous and hopeful book in spite of its theme of “too much”; it shows us we
never have enough love, enough empathy. There is never too much of that.
