from Literary Matters 11.3, June 2019
published by The Association of Literary Scholars, Critics, and Writers
Editor, Ryan Wilson.
This magisterial “guide” brings us to a Greece of geographical, historical, familial, and spiritual intersections. It’s a Greece that one can find only in the heart and in these poems that dwell there too.
From my review:
George Kalogeris’ Guide to Greece does not map a place called Greece, either past or present. What it maps is his desire to know what Greece has given him, and how it might matter in his life. He wants to know in the poem “Athanasios,” for example, what it meant to have had icons lit by votive candles in his childhood bedroom, the faces of a saint and the Virgin etching themselves into his consciousness. In another poem, “Iconostasis,” he wants to know what it means to hear the legend of monks on Crete who, when invaded, would disassemble an altarpiece, hide it among neighboring farms, and then reassemble it when the barbarians had left. In that poem he wants to conjure a moment when, the altarpiece back together, the believers stood before it praying, “face to face with the images of God.”