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
transport 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 his review of Wild Greens
in the Crab Orchard Review, Jon Tribble describes the "bitter and the
sweet" of 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.
