Approximately Paradise

By Don Schofield

Written over a period of twenty years, the poems in this collection chart the experiences of an American living in Greece. This odyssey of sorts is told in four parts, tracing a personal journey from naivete and alienation to identity and belonging. Don Schofield touches upon urban and island life in contemporary Greece that few outsiders see. Skillfully juxtaposing the old with the new, the expected with the unexpected, the historical with the modern, he entertains various themes bringing the past into relation with the present. Seemingly disparate traditions are merged - the pagan with the Christian, American literature with classical Greek. The main speaker often appears as the antithesis of the classical hero, Odysseus, willing to look foolish, lost and bewildered, and at times acknowledging his own moral weakness. Conventional interpretations of myth are redefined as personas from the archaic and biblical worlds examine the nature of desire or the experience of loss and exile on a contemporary stage. By dint of acute observation and innate sensitivity, Schofield evokes a sense of place by working himself into the psyche of the people and the landscape, thus enabling him to enr

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0813024617
• ISBN13: 9780813024615
• Release Date: March 2002
• Publisher: University Press of Florida
• Length: 95 Pages
• Weight: 0.35 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.3" x 5.5" x 8.5"

Customer Reviews

Approximately Paradise, by Don Schofield

As a Greek-American living versions of the cultural disenfranchisments described so lyrically by Don Schofield in APPROXIMATELY PARADISE, I appreciated this book's visceral take on the uneven, and unpredictable, land/mind scapes of his adopted Greece. There is much to admire here: the gritty immediacy of his eye for detail, "wheeled truck loaded/with torn couches, legless chairs,/cracked urns and lamps" ("Spring Cleaning") to the elegiac musings on loss, "...the tinge of blue along the edge/is the ripeness surrounding our lives/as we hold to what we first knew/of pleasure, the seed/of all sorrow" ("Blue Pears"). I appreciate the way this poet has weaved the varieties of his own personal disenfranchisments into Greece's own particular cultural earth.