Passion Maps

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 journey 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 Jon Tribble’s Crab Orchard Review of Wild Greens he describes the “the bitter and the sweet” in the 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.