A Soul Inside Each Stone

by John Tripoulas

Overview

Poetry. "Of the many good things I could say about these beautiful poems, the one I want to sing the loudest is that each presents a secret of some kind: the surprising cargo on a ship in the harbor, the ancient ruins under a modern village, the sailors in a herd of swine. This is what true poets do; they show you the world inside the world. The hero who hides a Jew from the Nazis, the face of old Agamemnon on the surface of the moon: reader, these and other treasures await you."—David Kirby

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781939929525
Publisher:	Dos Madres Press
Publication date:	05/06/2016
Pages:	116
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.40(d)

About the Author

Since 2009 John Tripoulas has served as the general surgeon on the Greek island of Ikaria, where his father and paternal grandparents were born. John was born and grew up in Cleveland, Ohio, but as a teenager attended high school in Athens, Greece. He graduated from Oberlin College with a BA in English literature and subsequently received an MD from Athens University Medical School. His maternal grandfather was the Greek poet and Olympic athlete Demetrios Golemis, whose poems John has translated into English in a volume titled Demolished Souls (Cosmos Press, 2011).

Editorial Reviews

2016-09-14
In this debut book, Tripoulas gives readers poetry from the land of the wine-dark sea. It’s likely difficult for any contemporary Greek poet to avoid the shadow of C.P. Cavafy, the greatest writer the archipelago nation has produced in the past 150 years. Writing of Cavafy in the introduction to his collected works, W.H. Auden praises the author as “exceptionally honest. He neither bowdlerizes nor glamorizes nor giggles.” Greek poet Tripoulas has definitely inherited some of this honesty from his countryman, and a deeply laudable sincerity infuses many of his works. Thus, when the author pays tribute to Cavafy in “The Poet,” he draws him not as the lion of European verse but as an ill-placed bureaucrat sipping spirits with a new friend in his apartment above a brothel: “Ah, but if he liked you...he would sit in the shadows / next to the candles burning low / speaking unkindly of his rival: / ‘No, no that’s Palamas whiskey, / for you I have something better.' ” In this book, it feels as if Tripoulas, too, is bringing out “something better.” The slim volume is the result of 10 years of painstaking work scrubbing and polishing 60-odd poems until they are clean, bright, and sharp. Many of the works discuss the landscape of the author’s homeland, and more than a few reveal Greece as a palimpsest in which the recent past sits lightly on layers and layers of history, spooling back into ancient years. In “Aigaleo Metro Station,” the author reminds readers that the Athens subway runs “alongside / the ancient road that starts / at the Keramikos Gate / and leads to the site of the Eleusinian mysteries.” Such history becomes a rich resource for Tripoulas—and one that he does not squander. He finds Greek myth similarly valuable; in another poem, the author offers a tongue-in-cheek tour of the island of Ikaria by reminding readers of its namesake, Icarus: “Grandma slips / hoedowning at the feast / and splits her head like a ripe melon. / People are falling / all over the island. / On the island of Ikaros / they honor his name.” Canny, candid poems about ancient and modern-day Greece that soar.

Kirkus Reviews