Among the Ruins: Guide to Greece by George Kalogeris

Drew Swinger

At the mention of Pausanias, the poem shifts into a long and twisty direct address that is at once more personal, playful, and plaintive than what precedes it, and worth quoting at length:

        And if this means, Pausanias, that no one
        Knows better than you that everything that’s happened

        Has already happened before, and also because
        Both Sparta and Arcadia are places

        You call Archaía Elláda, and that’s a term
        I heard my parents use to tell us where

        They came from when they meant to say Old Greece,
        I keep on reading down all the lists of names,

        Pausanias, keep paging through each region
        And wondering if perhaps you might have seen them,

        My elderly parents, somewhere in your travels.

There is intensity here just in the sequencing of logical statement—the way “and if...and also because...and that’s” builds to an “I keep” that is not fully consequent, as if all his reading, paging, and wondering would continue regardless. In this heightened mode, his teasing recollection at the expense of his parents becomes charged with affection. Archaía Elláda means “Ancient Greece,” not “Old Greece,” a fact which his parents may not have bothered to notice since, as we learn in other poems such as “Ambassador of the Dead,” they were working class and less schooled than their son in languages and literature. But in this chance intersection between Pausanias’s prose and his parents’ unsophisticated but native Greek, Kalogeris finds a place where old and new coexist and where a full recovery of his own personal past seems almost possible through Pausanias’s guidance.

Though English was Kalogeris’s first tongue, his relation to the Greek language as a cherished, even sacred soundscape of his youth is a recurring theme in these poems. For example, in “Athanasios,” a poem whose title is his father’s name, he writes of a memory of being put to bed in his room, where an icon of the Virgin Mother and Child was hung:

        When I tried to pronounce
        My father’s name, in Greek, with his other hand
        The Christ child kept two fingers pressed to his lips.
        Athanásios, the prophet, was about to speak.

And again, in “Basil,” a poem describing his father’s ritual of blessing their home with a sprig of basil and holy water, Kalogeris remembers his father “repeating something in Greek I couldn’t follow.” When at the poem’s end the word for basil comes back to him, in Greek, at his father’s funeral, his “tongue repeats the word / Like a wet leaf, companion to low chanting.” This splendid image, conveying his tongue’s flimsiness and responsiveness to his memories and surroundings in the midst of his grief, at the same time recalls 1 Corinthians, as Kalogeris has prepared the reader to notice via an earlier reference to his “seeing through a glass so clearly” as a child watching his father: “charity never faileth: but ...whether there be tongues, they shall cease.” (13:8 KJV)

Drew Swinger’s poems have appeared in Poetry and AGNI. Recent review work for Salamander has appeared in Poetry Daily’s Prose Feature. He is a graduate of Boston University’s Creative Writing Program and manages analytics for a global higher education company headquartered in Chicago. He lives in Lexington, MA.

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