One senses in these lines the pressures on the self and on our imaginative capacities under the ossifying influences of late capitalism everywhere present in Papgeorgiou’s verse. She sees the self-imposed nature of many of those pressures and is mindful of the limitations of particular historical moments. Problems of agency, disappearance, evasion, potential misperception, self-deception, inconstancy, resignation, a dialogue between ambivalence and urgency—they all strike one as similar in tone and atmosphere to Antonioni’s 1960 L’Avventura, where absence is a compelling presence. The film’s central character, Anna (Lea Massari), vanishes during a trip with a group of friends to the Mediterranean island of Panarea, and most of the film consequently centers around that absence, working—as does Not So Ill with You and Me—as a form of documentation not only of the pain and distress Anna’s vanishing creates, but of the gaps her disappearance uncovers in the lives of those connected to her.
We can be pollen
preserved in lake sediments,
old cranes by the waterfront,
but nothing has to happen
for it to be life.
The risk of poems so deeply focused on voice is that the voice must be that much more reliable; when it falters, the effect is compounded by Papageourgiou’s heavy use of the second person. While the “you” can be quite engaging, at times it is likely to provoke resistance in the reader, who seems to be already spoken for. This isn’t helped when “you” appears in a line like “Wherever you go,/there you are.”