Passion Maps - Paperback

by Adrianne Kalfopoulou (Author)

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."

Author Biography

Adrianne Kalfopoulou is the author of Wild Greens, a poetry collection from Red Hen Press, and a prose memoir, Broken Greek. She has published two chapbooks, Fig and Cumulus and various articles and essays. Passion Maps is her second collection of poems. She taught at the University of Edinburgh's international summer school program for several years and in various writing workshops in Greece. Currently she is an Assistant Professor at Hellenic American University in Athens where she developed the general education program and teaches literature.