Description

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."