Research Catalog

Title

Winthropos : poems / George Kalogeris.

Author

Kalogeris, George

Publication

Baton Rouge : Louisiana State University Press, [2021]

Items in the Library & Off-site

Details

Description

ix, 106 pages; 23 cm

Summary

""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"--

Subject

• Early memories > Poetry
• Families > Poetry
• American poetry > 21st century
• Winthrop (Mass.) > Poetry

Genre/Form

• Poetry.
• Elegies (Poetry)

Contents

Winthropos -- I. Talking to myself about poetry -- Baby monitor -- Veil -- Peponia -- Reading ZH -- Lethe -- Weighing grapes -- Tantalus -- Speech class -- Islands -- Dandelions -- Photograph albums -- My photograph at five -- II. Saturday night in the village -- III -- Berlitz School of Language -- On this day I complete my thirty-sixth year -- Just my imagination -- Reciting Henry Vaughan in the MRI -- On the suffering of the world -- Medicine ball -- Rilke rereading Hölderlin -- Epithalamium: thirty years later -- Moon River -- Swallow song -- The Golden Bough -- IV. Hades -- Hallucination -- Love -- Stele -- The Horses of Achilles -- Spring -- Mimnermus (7th century BC) -- Open casket -- Source of the Styx -- Tonsils -- At the grave -- Honey -- V. Proteus in Winthrop -- Lvov -- Calchas reading the signs -- Astoria -- The Funeral Oration, 431 BC -- Midnight mass -- RCA Victor -- Pausanias (2nd century AD) -- Mycenae revisited -- The old country -- Mavro Daphne -- VI. One-Credit seminar on the Odes of Horace -- 93 -- First steps -- Resurrection -- Holy Friday -- Walk-in freezer -- My guides -- Horace in Athens -- Wittgenstein -- Daedalos -- Birds in cemeteries.

Call Number

JFE 21-8518

ISBN

• 9780807175675
• 0807175676

LCCN

2020054207

OCLC

1226073750

Author

Kalogeris, George, author.

Title

Winthropos : poems / George Kalogeris.

Publisher

Baton Rouge : Louisiana State University Press, [2021]

Type of Content

text

Type of Medium

unmediated

Type of Carrier

volume

Other Form:

Online version: Kalogeris, George. Winthropos Baton Rouge : Louisiana State University Press, [2021] 9780807175996 (DLC) 2020054208

Research Call Number

JFE 21-8518