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Comments
About Lost Days
"These
poems of place--Greece, America, Paris, St. Lucia, UK--
depend on the poet's capacity for the vignette, the
snapshot, the swift conjuring of mood. These poems,
particularly the Greek ones, reveal an intent and faithful
eye and effortless fluency. The Greek ones in particular
because they are small windows into a bigger, darker
historic canvas. The radiance of panoramic Greece provides
the backdrop to places maimed and scarred and to the
small anecdotes of the fragile heroes contained within
it. In the St. Lucia poems, behind the brief conjuring
of a place and its ethos as a visitor one hears the
more powerful voice of Derek Walcott, powerful because
deeply rooted there (as in the Greek poems here). Nevertheless
the intensity of observation, the fluency and a psychological
stance that captures an emptiness behind the watching
makes this collection an impressive dedication to the
chosen places and people."
--Judy Gahagan, Ambit Magazine
"A
streetwise, well-travelled penseroso. He has a distinctive
body of subject matter. He has a sharp eye...work so
execeptionally rich in atmosphere and observation."
--Robert Saxton, Poetry Review
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"There
is sometimes a nicely melancholy tone to Papadopoulos's
work which puts him in the great tradition of poetic
sorrows. But the elegance and flair in these poems makes
the reader look forward to his next volume. Leviathan/Rattapallax
is wise to publish him." -- Tears in the
Fence, UK
"Papadopoulos
has made a successful debut and his work shows a potential
for his joining the voices of Greece's great poets."
--Athens News, May 4, 2001
"Stephanos
Papadopoulos has several qualities as a poet, one of
the most conspicuous being
his talent for the elegiac, his ability to bring to
life memories and artefacts from times past, 'before
the gods became a circus out of work'. 'Some things
will not collapse,' he winks at Sextus Propertius, and,
in his poetry, they don't. 'If I am to have a talent,'
he writes, 'let it be this…and hold a vision true, to
a moment's epiphany…' Stephanos Papadopoulos has that
talent."--Bengt Jangfeldt
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Anna
Maria Helena
The
morning curves to you, arched
like a bridge of sighs between
waking and sleep. The gaze
is hard to shift when a small
form among the twisted sheets
holds a door for me to enter --
offers a picture more delicate,
vulnerable, crystalline, than my own.
The light, with its own story,
counts the white brick of the wall
as if we have forever.
Anna Maria Helena,
like the bells of Easter
ringing softly down the mountain
from the isolated church,
you rise from your sleep
and rub the dreams from your eyes,
arms stretched like the blue-black span
of the cormorant's drying wings
before flight. Call no man happy
till he's dead, said a Greek,
but he had never watched
the sunrise pull you from your bed --
a rare fish from the accidental sea
that every thousand years or so
takes me, fisherman, for a ride.
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Kouzi
Street
The
twang of a bedspring, the crack
of cars and yellow trolleys on the hacked
streets of Ambelokipi's midmorning,
as Mavraki leans to the edge of his
sway-backed bed and sets his feet on cold tile.
On the fifth floor a woman beats a red
flocatti. Her wicker slaps like gunshots
over the dull bleating of trapped cars.
In his tilted window frame, a landscape---
the stadium's poured concrete shell, the sky's
sliver over the blank gaze of brown shutters,
the horizon close enough to spit on.
He spoons coffee in the small copper pot,
lights the Petro-Gaz and a cigarette
with the same match. His little baglamá
hangs like a spoon from a nail on the wall.
He picks it up with blunt fingers and strums,
till Anatolia's mourning clatters
like coins thrown against a pane of glass.
On the walk beneath Mavraki's window
a lame pensioner licks his thumb and counts
Friday's crumpled bills. He hears the chink-chink
of the baglamá above the traffic,
adjusts his black arm band,
swears and starts again. Across the street
a woman runs after a moving bus.
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