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Memento Tsunami

by Vasiliki Katsarou

These poems never say a word too much, but their language, by turns wry and musical, playful and gorgeous, is not minimalist at all.  They are at once precise and vivid.  They speak with an elliptical urgency.

—James Richardson, author of By the Numbers: Poems and Aphorisms

 

In “Dab of Blue Paint,” Vasiliki Katsarou asks,  “What then are we to do/with all those moments/ when the eye stops the heart?”  Memento Tsunami is her answer, poems that catch “that glint of beauty going by” as they tumble on the “giant wave” of memory.

—Lois Marie Harrod, author of Brief Term

 

The denotation of “memento” is that it may be a keepsake, but it can also be a warning(…)  Katsarou's poems are all of these, but coupled with the connotations of “tsunami,” they are also about what overtakes and overcomes us, what crashes through our lives, and what is left in the wake, how “all the homes of childhood are nowhere,” but in the morning after we “think...our selves more alive.” She seeks to connect dots across histories and memory in these “moon-loosened” lyrics rich with sensuality and image.

—Laura McCullough, author of Panic

 

It’s a heady concoction Vasiliki Katsarou offers us in Memento Tsunami: musical, playful, polyglot, mindful of how history and passion are coming to overtake us. Supple and delicate, her poems speak the language of the world and time traveler who appeals to all ears and minds. After delighting in these poems, now tender, now elegiac, now goofy, now celebratory, the thankful reader may well echo one of those poems: “all this has been given for us.”

—John Timpane, Books Editor, Philadelphia Inquirer

 

Reading Vasiliki Katsarou’s poetry is like watching an exquisitely made film: so beautiful are the images moving through time that you want to pause and let your eyes luxuriate over each frame; so beautiful is the music that you don’t want the movement to stop. We hear echoes of Sappho, Emily Dickinson, H.D., Mina Loy, Lorine Niedecker, whose beautiful poetry, like Katsarou’s is crafted with classical discipline, yet is not merely beautiful, nor merely classical. Memento Tsunami is breathtaking and reads as sustained filmic meditation on the woman artist, ancestry, the immigrant daughter’s unfixed, hyphenated identity, a world where an iPod becomes an i (a self, perhaps) and a pod (a natural thing, perhaps), where everything, each particular the poet places just so—sublimely—on the page might be poised for flight and the possibility to “embody // velocity.”