This second collection by Stelios Mormoris offers three sections: Lamentations, Flora Mortis, and Perishable.
Lamentations begins with “Belle-Ile,” which opens with a setting that is a challenge to the “we” of the poem: “thistle shoots,” “violet cliffs, layered / like broken plates of mica,” “the sky flattened on the sea,” “cold lesson of distance.” None of this is inviting; yet, “we waded in the tides’ resistance // then dove.” Once in the water, the poem turns softer, smoother: “the concaves / of our backs spooning the soft waves.” It is there that “we took our vows / in the ink-dark undertow,” the “we” hidden as they take their vows and the undertow “[pulls] us in unison, our eyes slit / by the horizon.” Then comes another turn: the horizon “flirted out of sight / the terrible birds of our derision.” This is not a comfortable place for the joining of two people. The setting prepares the reader for disturbance and displacement, changing the joining into a perilous and potentially perishable thing.
In “Indigo,” the poet begins in an omniscient point of view through the second stanza:
A child’s face faces the world
like light borne in water blinking awake.
What theatre of stars doesn’t expire?
From there, the reader is swept into the poem by a shift to first person point of view: “I stand in the night heat / of high summer...” The “I” cannot gather “nettings // of stars,” has lost the ability to “locate / the tendrils of constellations.” The “I,” like the “we” in the “ink-dark undertow” of the first poem, is back in the dark: “I sink in blackish water, / and the indigo shroud of the universe lifts.”
“Vespers” is a three-section love poem, sexual and brave, opening with: “I slipped inside you while / you slept.” The lovers are “halves of one lung.” Religion is prominent. In section one, the altar boy’s erection is “compressed under crisp // ironed pants.” By the end of this section, the “flame” is calmer, “waxing in its own light.” In section two, the “I’s” lover is sitting in a pew, “an animal with folded paws” listening to a “thunderous sermon / on baptism.” The “I” notices “your thick legs open.” The “hot wet seed” turns “cold and dry.” In the third section, there is Easter, an altar, and “echoes / of sermons,” but there is also the setting of an “aqua lagoon” and they are “reciting Kant.” The poem closes when the “I” feels physical intimacy, “silent / praise after sex,” and “shadows’ / wings riding my shoulders.”
Flora Mortis begins with “Yià Yià” and the fleeting life of fireflies the “I” (age four) leaves at his grandmother’s door. She lacquers her hair, “gift from the blonde son / of her dark son,” and the “I” touches the face of that son in his pocket, “summoning the trace / of the father I never saw.” He and yià yià drive to the beach and home. She pours tea. “She kept the fireflies to sleep,” while the “I” “watched them simmer.” She whispers to the father: “one curse brings a spring of blessings.” When the “I” sets the fireflies free, they rise
while he lurked in the halo
of a candle
on this dry, flammable night
I couldn’t blow out.
In “Watermelon,” the poet’s deft images shine. This reader will never view a watermelon the same way again.
How easily you excavate the outsized
placenta, encased in jungle-green stripes—
cut a smile through its fibrous belly
The guests “partake” greedily, their “restraint suspended.” They sink “down / through small aqueous explosions.” “No one takes a breath while they eat.” This joyful and animal abandon continues all the way to the end where they “just dig in.” Not only is this poem delightful, it gives the reader a breath in the intensity of these poems.
The final section, Perishable, offers a number of longer poems, including “Perishable,” the final poem. This poem connects the poet to his family generations most deeply (through his grandfather), his roots, and his childhood. The grandfather and the boy, age six, “hugged the shore road in Oyster Bay, New York.” Even at 8:23 a.m., the boy is eating grape ice cubes and the grandfather is smoking his pipe, “fretful about something.” The poet then harks back to yià yià who can no longer “mount the stairs.” The boy realizes that his grandfather’s “eyes as dark as the blue Aegean he left for a life in America burdened him.” Yet, the grandfather “could peer into the souls of flowers.” He waves to the orange daylilies as they enter a “land of estates and privilege, of smiles and patronage.” There is class, there is illness (not just yià yià’s inability to navigate stairs, but the grandfather’s cancer), there are gladioli, the funeral flower that foreshadows his grandfather’s death. Intimate details abound: “papou was all smiles, under his moth-eaten hat”; “the silver radio in his old Ford”; singing “along to Patsy Cline.” And always there are flowers and more flowers—red poppies, pink peonies, pear blossom “pale as the inside of my mother’s limp forearm I pressed every morning for her pulse, with Greek coffee, praying she’d wake.” The lyricism of this poem is breathtaking, images piling on images. But, alas, the boy and the reader understand an end is near: “nothing after this harlequin morning could match the frailty of his cloudy eyes.” The boy’s tears build “like saline in a mesh.” The grandfather slips “the paper ring off his Cuban cigar before his last smoke.” In the last image, the grandfather
coasted down the serpentine incline under a pelt of rain,
His fist on the gear, his grandiloquent iris turning in on itself.
As the poet does himself in this collection. In the acknowledgments, Mormoris references the lovers, relatives, even a homeless prostitute in these poems. He loves them all. It is a pleasure to read these poems, particularly aloud, letting the images and the sounds roll off the tongue and fill the world. It is a pleasure to see another collection by Stelios Mormoris.
Aline Soules’ poetry, fiction, and book reviews have appeared in Kenyon Review, Houston Literary Review, Poetry Midwest, Galway Review, Flash Fiction Magazine, Los Angeles Review, Colorado Review, and others.She earned her MFA in Creative Writing from Antioch University Los Angeles. Online: https://alinesoules.com