Vasiliki Katsarou was born and raised in Massachusetts to Greek-born parents, and educated at Harvard College, the University of Paris I-Sorbonne, and Boston University. She is a Pushcart Prize-nominated poet whose poems have appeared in Poetry Daily, wicked alice, Press 1, and US 1 Worksheets, as well as in two upcoming anthologies: Rabbit Ears: TV Poems (Poets Wear Prada), and Not Somewhere Else But Here: A Contemporary Anthology of Women and Place (Sundress Publications).
Of Memento Tsunami, Katsarou’s first collection, published in 2011, Aliki Barnstone has written: “Memento Tsunami is breathtaking and reads as sustained filmic meditation on the woman artist, ancestry, the immigrant daughter’s unfixed, hyphenated identity…We hear echoes of Sappho, Emily Dickinson, H.D., Mina Loy, and Lorine Niedecker, whose beautiful poetry, like Katsarou’s, is crafted with classical discipline, yet is not merely beautiful, nor merely classical.”
Vasiliki Katsarou has also worked in film and television production in France and Greece, and written and directed an award-winning 35mm short film, Fruitlands 1843, about the Transcendentalist utopian community. She currently directs the Panoply Books Reading Series in Lambertville, New Jersey.
The poems below are from Vasiliki Katsarou’s full-length collection, Memento Tsunami, published by Ragged Sky Press in 2011.
I.
Londonienne nonagenarian
Missoni-clad with leather bag
contemporary of Bloomsbury
portrait taken by me
II.
Australian of the lustral basin
architect adrift aloft
redesigning negative space
with Gaudí and Don Quixote
III.
Anna from Iraklion
knows all there is to know
about sun, thong
and art history
IV.
Minoan goddess
bull-leaper
your pattern spirals over
the real vessel
V.
Iconographic Eleftheria
what is the difference
between freedom and liberty
your sister wants to know
Pier at Cannes
seen at a film (fish)
market
across the bay, a string of lights
never thought she’d find herself
in an Antonioni film
yet here she is and so is he—
mere witnesses to an abstraction
the dark sea and dark sky meet somewhere
she thinks,
directing herself to find a gesture
as apt as this moment
he stares back
in irreflection
The sea and sky may kiss at the horizon
Why not we?
She turns
a cartwheel instead
to approach him
and yet remain distant
absurdity strikes
at the very heart
of the proposition
What a child, an American!
He is of course a French polygamist
with several children by several wives in farmhouses
scattered about the French countryside
so fated to act out
two wholly different scripts,
he says
Un écrivain a dit…
[A writer once said]
là où toutes les eaux se mèlent, là où il y a un delta—
[Where all the waters come together, at the mouth]
la merde l’a créé.
[shit created it.]
But what about beauty
she wonders too late
doesn’t beauty equal love?
she wanders too late
the sky darkens further
La bêtise
[Nonsense]
is his reply
from the edge
of that shore
they part
Greek Family Myth
Hunter and barterer,
my grandfather
dances upon the waters,
unfurls his net
to gather up the sea-ephemera
shrimp and urchins,
and the eyes of fish
are his currency
Yiayia knows to set aside
a few morsels for you,
flanked by three brothers and an older sister
with whom you’d never fight,
never speak up, even,
for your share at the table
The sensitive one, wartime-thin,
and hidden
beneath the bed
if some unsolicitous word
rained down upon your head
Your sister recalls you to me now
as Yiayia’s favorite,
The pretty one, talented and lithe,
the one they let slip away for free,
across the sea
In our Greek family myth
you are the sacrificed
Seamstress at fourteen,
you stitch Gypsy wedding dresses
and suits for gentry on the hill
Before you marry
this money you make by needle-prick
Will buy a toehold in Athens
for your older brother,
his shoe shop,
a marriage, three strapping children
Is what pays the dowry
for your proud older sister,
her one-bedroom in a smart part of the city
that after forty years of marriage
and motorcycle exhaust,
remains pastel-colored,
laden with delicate lace cloths
I think of all those Greek keys
and spirals and monograms
that you and she stitched by hand
while waiting what seemed an eternity
for the bridegroom to appear
I, too, lay my newly-married head
upon those embroidered pillows
It was my fate,
my childless aunt tells me
to be a mother to my sister, to my brother,
to my nieces,
and even to my mother
As you, her sister, wait
but across the sea
Once and future sacrifice to your own husband,
destiny personally arranged for you
by our ancestors,
You who are my mother,
my other,
painter of plaint,
mender-in-chief.
Modern Greek
I love you so
I work to death
I love you so
I work you
to death
I love you so
you work me to death
Don’t suppose we have time
to stroll among the ruins and sip
our cup of hemlock and brine
Hotel Eleftheria
*eleftheria is the modern Greek word for freedom
Where the barren mountain meets the fertile sea
Restless, foam-capped
shape-shifting she-
sea
[Sea always
embodied by Greek non-
women poets as
She]
Sea swallow seen
from the ship dipping
its nib
delicately
into the she-sea
[Eros and the mermaid
still play]
Where the barren mountain meets the fertile sea
Barren mountain written
on with traces of habitation
Each stone wall a sentence,
each stone
a vocable of sorts
The AE
of Mykonos as seen by me
decades later
a glimmer
of understanding
Where the barren mountain meets the fertile sea
The mountain has been spoken for
The sea, unspeakable
[The horrors gallop along the edges
The joy plays in full view of the sun]
Poetry in this post: © Vasiliki Katsarou
Published with the permission of Vasiliki Katsarou