At the center of
poem is grief over the past's passing,
the ache of trying to
to values and moments that give life
its meaning, and the
but battered hope that things might,
somewhere and somehow, be
impulses behind the poems in this first collection are as historical
of the recent past (through depictions of the lives of the poet's Greek
grandparents and their generation), and as witness to the troubles and
blessings of living within a modern Greek world whose patriarchy is as
ingrained into the culture as acid rain is into the edifaces of Athens.
A distinguishing aspect of
this book is that it is not dominated by poems updating or revising
myths. One poem is called "To Penelope," but the rest of the social
deal with the everyday lives of people living in a land that has seen
much war, too many brutal occupations,
and stifling religious repression. Adrianne Kalfopoulou finds
in the ordinary than in the mythic, and the poems are propelled by
that resonate under the pressure of understatement and domestic
Even "To Penelope" is focused on managing dailiness — cooking,
serving wine, deciding what to do with stale bread, goats in the
and yearnings barely under control. At the center of almost every
is grief over the past's passing, the ache of trying to hold on to
and moments that give life its meaning, and the persistent but battered
hope that things might, somewhere and somehow, be better. Frost
remarked that some of Yeats's poems made "beauty ache," and the best of
Kalfopoulou's poems do just that.
in the book's first section, about her grandparents, describe the lives
of the generation who suffered the effects of the Smyrnian tragedy, the
Nazi and Italian occupations during WWII, the Greek Civil War, and
rule. This section chronicles the survival of people who lost
and attempts to read the silences of that loss, to commend the human
that goes on giving when there is little left to give.
striking images of survival that rarely make the history books: "they
cats for hospital patients," "years before we put a potato to our
"the wait beneath German offices to catch apple cores," "blood left on
kitchen walls," "the gilded frame with the bullet hole."
third poem, "Chrisavgi," is the name of a ninety-nine year old great
It presents a sequence of images about how this aunt went about her
life despite the memories of genocide, starvation, and loss of family.
A poignant image near the end of the poem is of her giving a young Nazi
"who came to the door" one of the three eggs she had found. After she
dead, her brother asks: "Do you imagine that? / Three years without a
of bread? / And she gave an egg away." Kalfopoulou reads this image
a different lens:
I see the light
still ochre on the tiles
remember Chrisavgi ate raisins
one by one,
as if in shame.
The poem ends with a
of Chrisavgi's empty room after she has died; the last image is of her
"brown-blue" calico dress which "is white around the waist, / some
flakes still cling." In a life spent serving others, Chrisavgi has had
few moments of personal pleasure, but unlike her brother who "roams all
night" Chrisavgi can sleep and takes joy in watering an almond tree as
she relishes time alone at night. In the end those last flour
to the image of her as much as the images of these poems cling to us.
the sense that the legacy of these admirable but self-denying women of
her grandparent's generation has been a resolve to break the cycle of
and silence, to seek a fuller more rewarding personal life. Yet
is harder than the resolve seems to promise: "the game / gets serious,
stakes higher, as we dare to live / as we gather our living." The
of "daring to live" — surviving divorce, raising a child
living the demands of work and various lovers and the grief of losses —
is underneath the skin of these poems in this book. The struggle is
on against a new kind of silence: the child who "measures my presence"
but "has no idea of the distance I have come"; the lovers who have "no
idea of love's dice / though gambled, for real"; the "terror in the
/ that does not stop with the blood"; the daughter whose eyes "like
candy" "ask for the world whole." These are poems in search of balance,
a satisfaction that will sustain.
and modes of discourse in this book are confessional. Kalfopoulou
writes straight-forwardly and frankly about her personal life, and the
poems owe much to the work of Sharon Olds. Olds can be daring and
about her father's abuses, her mother's passivity, her sexuality, but
irony is that the parameters of her "daring" are often defined in
male terms: she can be sexually predatory, violent or self-dramatizing
in her anger toward the miscreants who have differing views.
we witness Kalfopoulou's search for an identity outside the models
by the generations of women before her, it doesn't seem as deliberately
poetic as Olds' search. Perhaps one reason is the difference in
Olds has been given permission to speak by Millay, Plath, Sexton, and
but does take risks of her own in tone and graphic visuals.
a cultural paradigm shift has sanctified this tone and celebration of
"self" above other obligations. Kalfopoulou lives in a culture
values and realities are so thoroughly patriarchal that gender
is a social and religious birthright, so much so that one often feels
visceral tension in many of the poems as they try to transcend
"the priest" might be "missing" and "the murmur is a silence / only the
initiated understand." Kalfopoulou's struggle is not abstract and
literary; every day is a negotiation between identity and cultural
reason is Kalfopoulou's relationship with poetry and language.
is not so much trying to create a self as she is trying to understand
one she has, to see its blessings and blunders, to calibrate its range
of emotions, to test the solidity of her ideas and feelings. The
most poetically self-conscious poem in the book is called "Growing,"
she discusses the distance between domestic duty — the time she spends
helping her daughter with homework, bathing, braiding her hair — and
image of herself as a poet: "I am really in a poem, I say, cutting /
together, this poem / I am always aiming at." "Growing" examines
the tension between the two lives: the dynamic flux of domestic reality
and the life pinned or "cut" into a poem and understood. The
accuses the mother of rejecting the father — "you threw him out didn't
you" — and after the explanation "weighs" "fragments" "that may never
written." The ends of writing and dialogue are the same:
what you learn, what you can take with you." What the poem gives
her, what she is always "aiming at," is understanding. At the
of this poem is the notion that writing is essentially about what you
and take with you rather than what you "create." We never get the
sense that Olds views life or language this way.
the poem that most clearly illustrates her fairness and the
for emotional balance evident in many of the poems is "Coming
poem presents a touching scene where the husband is gathering his
and the last of his belongings before leaving. This situation
presented a ripe opportunity for literary revenge or demonization, but
what remains at the center of the poem is a mutual loss of innocence.
He is entirely given to the packing
and I am entirely absorbed in not looking
till I notice the small frying pan,
his favorite, and a large framed picture
of another period where he is lazily relaxed,
his hand calmly over my knee,
his eyes optimistic. I am childlike in my smile.
Neither of us know. It is a fine image,
my girlishness, his ease, the image
I least recognize in the words he leaves me—
"I wish I could give you some word of luck.
But I don't have the courage." I turn back
to the kitchen where he has chosen not
to take the pan, the picture, some white cups
I return to the shelf.
That "Neither of us know"
"fine image" of the picture suggest there is no blame here, that times
and people change almost without our noticing. They are equally
in their vulnerability. The poem captures the fragile composure
original moment, the deliberate courage required to complete the break.
of Kalfopoulou's most successful poems is in their embrace of life's
the title poem suggests that such complexity is in fact nurturing:
my body a field too, untended, then found
in season. We didn't stop the gathering—
dandelion, chamomile, bramble,
we didn't leave out the mud or blood or ground parts.
Despite the mess, we were in season and
found it all edible.
Greens is a particularly appropriate title for this collection.
the poems make a circular journey: they begin with the broader
climate of Greece, move into the lives of the poet's
out personal boundaries and claims, and end with the section called
that resolves some of the more difficult conflicts in the previous
The book's concluding poem "Corinna's Bones" — another great aunt after
whom the poet's daughter is named (we presume) — suggests the past has
been brought up to the present, and one of the images that binds them,
that makes the connection possible, is "wild greens." For the old
the greens are a source of survival gathered "from between railroad
as they "stood in line for the rationed peas"; for the poet the greens
have come to represent the survival of memory and an acceptance of the
"bramble" and "mud" and "blood" of the life that has been given her: a
synthesis of the wild and domestic, the old and new, the brutal and
Greens is a remarkable debut and sends a message from Greece we
not heard so dramatically or passionately expressed.
Greens. Los Angeles, California: Red Hen Press, 2002.
© by Joseph Powell