Adrianne Kalfopoulou – författare

Passion Maps is a lyrical cartography of historical and biographical experiences, of the poet's lived and imagined mappings. The poems in this collection chart a world itinerary of stopping places, or stassis—a transliterated Greek word for a stop or a pause—that transport the reader from locations of childhood memory to pauses of lost love, and lost life, through landscapes as disparate as Vietnam, Greece, New Jersey, and the Balkans. As poet and critic Joseph Powell described Kalfopoulou's first collection, Wild Greens, "the best of these poems make beauty ache", a phrase used by Frost to describe Yeats' poetry; of this new collection Powell notes a range of "different types of utterance, of poems ambitious and experimental in a volume that is tough, tender and honest throughout."As Passion Maps suggests, these are poems of experiences that have mapped, as much as experiences that have become maps; there are the inevitable first cartographies of family: a father "stoic/ in brutal combat", a mother who "would have preferred to sing her words" that expand into the broader mappings of "bygone lives,/" and "the lyric ruin of cities", an America of "New World opportunity" and an old world of "whole towns/now erased by the grass." In his review of Wild Greens in the Crab Orchard Review, Jon Tribble describes the "bitter and the sweet" of poems that "test our palates" and "remind us that the bread and meat and fruits and greens of life come with many flavors and at a cost that is as dear as it is worthwhile." The same could be said of Kalfopoulou's second collection though here we have the voice of a poet who has broadened her style to include more of the world.

The essays in Ruin link meditations on teaching, friendship, motherhood, love, the financial meltdown in Greece, the shared language of politics and advertising, Occupy Wall Street, and the Parthenon Marbles into a relentless interrogation of identity and loss. Kalfopoulou’s Athens and New York are twinned sites of perpetual dislocation, palimpsests of political, economic, cultural—and personal—crisis. The refugee, the immigrant, the fragmented ‘I’ charted in these essays—all are studies in exilic living, pilgrims wandering the wreckage of late capitalism.

A History of Too Much begins with poems that address an Athens undergoing the first ravages of political and financial crisis; the inhabitants of these poems voice extravagant losses and the unpredictable, are often torn between a desire “to flee, but flee where?” The gods and goddesses will still be called upon, but Demeter is nonplussed in her mourning, Alexander the Great drunk, and the statues of antiquity exposed to the anarchies of spray-painted slogans and thrown Molotovs. If history’s excesses are exhausted they are also reinvented in the idiom of the contemporary moment; here where “the costumes were all off” and “the actors overplayed their parts,” there is a story to tell: “The light was almost gone, / the road now dark.”

The re in refuge is a collection of linked essays joined with photographs that investigate ideas of refuge, broadly defined, from the intimacies of romance to the promises of the nation state. Written over the span of a decade, the collection shapes experiences and events that interrogate their larger political and social contexts. The emerging European refugee crisis, yet to become headline news, frames the opening essays, with stories of those lost in their passage across the Mediterranean. In 2014 Italy and the United Kingdom ended funding for naval rescue operations in the Mediterranean Sea, and the influx of refugees into Greece reconfigures some of Athens' neighborhoods. A once abandoned school building becomes a squat where Kalfopoulou and other volunteers engage with refugee communities that include families from Afghanistan, Syria, and Kurdistan. As Kalfopoulou notes in “The Parts Don’t Add Up” a visual essay, “Embedded in the word refugee is refuge,” suggesting that the vectors of shelter have as much to do with what one carries of culture and place as they are about a tangible home.

“It is a difficult thing to write simply and eloquently with quiet and intense passion in ways that are unflinchingly personal but also fold the reader into the depths of history and myth. This is partly what Adrianne Kalfopoulou’s poems do for me. They are also celebrations reminding me how words can perform acts of affirmation and joy no matter what griefs or complex experiences they contain. These poems attain the beauty of ritual.” —T. Alan Broughton