Wild Greens

By Adrianne Kalfopoulou

"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

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1888996587
• ISBN13: 9781888996586
• Release Date: September 2002
• Publisher: Red Hen Press
• Length: 80 Pages
• Weight: 0.30 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.2" x 6.0" x 8.9"

Customer Reviews

An Impressive Collection

In this exceptionally strong collection, Greece comes alive in a burst of colors--green, purple, yellow, red. But Kalfopoulou teases all of the reader's senses as she mixes the sensuous and the sensual. Throughout the poems her attention to the soil and what grows there merges naturally and inevitably with the care of the human body. We are introduced to the land: its climate, its customs, its foods, its special words. We sense the poet's attachment to Greece and her awareness of its history of battles and turbulence. We feel the omnipresence of Time and the continuity from one generation to the next. Set against the backdrop of history is the personal--the end of a marriage and the challenges of single motherhood. In "Bliss," a particularly fine poem, Kalfopoulou beautifully captures this situation in a series of deft images, letting the story unfold through a catalog of what the husband takes and what he leaves behind. A number of Kalfopoulou's images weave their way throughout the poems and give the collection a tight but subtle structure. The wild greens of the title poem, for example, surface again and again as do the contrasting images of clothing and nakedness, along with a constellation of related images--bathing, hair, wrinkles, sheets, underwear, dresses, buttons. These free verse poems display Kalfopoulou's mastery of craft. Her sense of the line break is impeccable, and there's not an unnecessary word or syllable to be found. In these admirably crafted poems, Kalfopoulou has given us poems that capture the history, the beauty, and the passion of Greece and the people who live there.

A Stunning Debut Volume

?Thunder buries the liturgy,? writes Kalfopoulou in ?Good Friday,? announcing the poles of her argument: ?gale winds beat ... as if His wrapped and sheeted body could be the symbol of/resurrection,? the poet?s use of the conditional suggesting a belief that perhaps it cannot. Life refuses to be constellated. Passion outstrips it; nature abhors it. Here at the crossroads of the passions, what Greek civilization carves out of this life, moored conditionally, temporarily, to this rocky soil, is a sometimes violent, hard-won beauty its inhabitants refuse to relinquish--a beauty, one might add, that has endured for centuries, despite invasion, poverty, natural disaster, war. What transcendence is found here is found on its knees. For Kalfopoulou, as for another Mediterranean poet, Rene Char, every life that dawns kills one of the injured. As exemplified by the subject matter of "Burgundy" and "Growing," Kalfopoulou is all too aware of what can die in the struggle: a poem, a marriage, consciousness itself. Things in her universe do not merge into a blurred likeness; they do not compromise each other or themselves by doing so. Each extreme keeps its extreme nature. Thus the energies of these poems are often ?techtonic? and the processes which shape human life are often violent. If these energies are mitigated in any way, it is by the processes of everyday life, the sound of bee-thrum in a grape arbor, a the pinch of anitho added to boiled carrots, stolen moments of love-making, life ripe with caress of a body. But if Wild Greens is the narrative of the harshness of this life, it is also the lyric rendering, as the book?s epigraph suggests, of life?s richness, the two irretrievably entwined. In this stunning debut volume, the felt pleasure is found in the texture and detail of lived life, all of it rendered with lucid affection for the detail, even the struggle, of the lived life. Like the wild greens themselves, Kalfopoulou revels in the beauty and drama of the tempest and will risk ruin in order not to miss the electrifying drama when the lightening strikes. Kalfopoulou knows the price of poetry. In order to write it, one must have lived, and in these poems, she does with a Phaedran intensity.

Superb Poetry!!

Divided in 3 parts this book contains poems that touch your heart. In the first part, all her poems refer in some way or another to Greece. Being a Greek-american myself, I find it amazing how well she manages through her poems to show life in Greece(especially in the villages), the local customs and still, use the english language so superbly. It feels like you are readind a novel except it is a poem. Greek islands float before your eyes, greek words like koliva, chrisavgi, pappou, yiayia dance before your eyes and soul. Anyone who has lived in Greece will immediately realize this and, I'm sure, get really emotional. But even if one has never visited this country he will still feel that he does know something about it, after reading these poems.They simply "smell"of Greece (the eucalyptus, chamomile, jasmine, bougainvillea, lemons, all of these in her lovely poems). The second and third part contain more ... poems, poems describing all kinds of relationships..., strong feelings, poems that leave a bitter or sweet feeling inside. They talk of war, of love,of rejection, of passion, of LIFE. Some of my favourite poems are WILD GREENS, THE GARDEN, DAYS, CONVERSATION, PERGOLA, WRINKLES. I think everyone will enjoy reading them. They are very touching and full of life's experience. It goes without saying that she is an inspired poet who masters the language extremely well. I can only add that I have already read these poems more than once and dedicated a few to friends.Hope she has a new book out soon!