Winthropos - by George Kalogeris (Paperback)

About the Book

""Winthropos," the title of George Kalogeris's new collection of poetry, comes from the "Greek-ified" name his father, an immigrant from Greece, gave to the blue-collar New England town where the family lived. Following in the spirit of his acclaimed Guide to Greece, Kalogeris conjures the town of Winthrop, Massachusetts, as a central locus of lyric and elegiac memory. While the poems often reach back into the Hellenic past for imagery and inspiration, they just as often reside in the American present of their conception. The author's grocer-father worries over his son possibly being drafted for Vietnam, standing at his butcher's block like a priest in Homer trying to read the gory entrails. Andy Williams singing "Moon River" in the family parlor evokes the River Lethe flowing halfway up a straw as a beloved Uncle Charlie lies dying in hospice. Speech class lessons with "Mrs. Sea Gull" (Mrs. Segal) reveal English diphthongs that are hard to pronounce, but "Thalassa" rolls off the speaker's tongue like pebbles on Winthrop Beach. Rich with classical allusion and tragic vision, including translations of Cavafy and Leopardi, "Winthropos" plumbs childhood memory and local custom in a work of meditative power and evocative beauty"--

Book Synopsis

Winner of the Sheila Margaret Motton Book Prize

Winthropos, the title of George Kalogeris's new poetry collection, comes from the "Greek-ified" name his father, an immigrant from Greece, gave to the blue-collar New England town where the family lived. Following in the spirit of his acclaimed Guide to Greece, Kalogeris conjures Winthrop, Massachusetts, as a central locus of lyric and elegiac memory. While the poems in Winthropos reach back into the Hellenic past for imagery and inspiration, they often reside in the American present of their conception, forging childhood memory and local custom into a work of meditative power and evocative beauty.

Review Quotes

Winthropos--that "os" turns the trick. In adding that Greek suffix to an American placename George Kalogeris opens his poetry to the complexities of life. (Just see his great poem "Hades.") It's as if he remembers or looks around him and thinks, "It's all Greek to me." The result is the power of this book, the claim it makes on us.-- "Richard J. Fein"

In this utterly compelling poetry, George Kalogeris faces without flinching the facts of what he calls "brute mortality." He invokes the dead in wars both ancient and modern. He conjures the voices of deceased and beloved family, friends, mentors. He helps us feel not only absence, but the lasting presence of these shades. Winthropos comes to us blessed by Orpheus.-- "Fred Marchant"

George Kalogeris's idiom and cadence flow from Homer through Seferis and Cavafy and his immigrant parents' Greek into a poetry of eerie, timeless freshness in English. Redolent of honey and dark wine, his lines make an enchanted space where the dead and the living commune, where we cannot tell mourning from celebration. A breathtaking performance.-- "Rosanna Warren"

Haunted by memories of growing beyond, but never away from, the Greek worlds of his parents and ancestors, and infused by an intimate knowledge of classical literature (from Homer to Horace), George Kalogeris's poems in fact display an utterly contemporary sensibility. They are in league not only with the "channelings" of the poet's forerunners Cavafy and Seferis, but also with the conjurings of poets such as Joseph Brodsky, Zbigniew Herbert, and Seamus Heaney, who knew that the ancients can shed light on our own dark times.-- "Jonathan Aaron"

Through his knowledge of the culture of the Greek towns his parents came from, and his knowledge of the town of Winthrop, Massachusetts, where he grew up, and his deep knowledge of the poetry of ancient Greece, there is a great merging by means of his powerful versification in these marvelous poems.-- "David Ferry"

About the Author

George Kalogeris has published three books of poetry, including Guide to Greece. His work has received the James Dickey Poetry Prize and been selected by Christopher Ricks for the anthology Joining Music with Reason. He teaches literature and classics in translation at Suffolk University.