****** - Verified Buyer
4.5
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.
