Published last May by
Michael Cross's Compline Press, Daphnephoria,
a recent chapbook by Eleni Stecopoulos, remains one of the more exquisite
unions of felt language and physical production in the relatively small but
determined world of small press literary endeavor. The poems are difficult to
delineate in terms of content. Rather, like the later sections in her
full-length collection Armies of
Compassion (Palm Press, 2010), they seem to set out points on the periphery
of a researched, imagined space, a place of remedy and ritual recuperation.
Channeling back
through the roots of words, she finds in the Greek of her "mother's/ancestral
tongue" (as she explains in aresponse to the question of
"somatics"1) a language commensurate with such a place:
No man is an oikos
but a mother
husbands the economy
Three-legged
dogphysician porous as rock
plastic as Greek
turning
every word
compounded from two
(7)
Even the neologism of
the title announces this concern. The Ancient Greek combining form pherein "to bear" exists in
English primarily in the morphological diptych euphoria and dysphoria,
through which we can think ourselves as bearing (what exactly—inner or outer,
psychical or physical—the whole complex) either well or ill.
Under the duress of
Apollo, Daphne chose to return to the earth, and from there blossoms forth as a
tree, leaves, paper. Not only in the language of the poems themselves—
to be a girl who asks in remedy
black walnut white cedar
(4)
I'll become
metal wood
(5)
—but in the
workmanship of the chapbook, a profound care and desire almost to be the material are manifest. Like other
of Cross's work, the design as a whole, and in particular the layers of
endpapers (within which the poems rest encased as though in bark), reveals a
mind obsessively attuned as much to the minimal as to the baroque.
1 This from a response to the
question of "somatics" as posed in a questionnaire by Thom Donovan.
The response was posted on Harriet: a
poetry blog on April 29, 2011 [available here]. Stecopoulos writes:
... soma as a Greek word has been in my ear
my whole life, and it carries a potency and warmth that “body” does not for me.
And this is despite the fact that English is my first language. (So why this
should be the case—the paradoxical way that the mother’s/ancestral tongue feels
more natural or intimate than the native language—is itself an example of
somatic knowing, which can’t be extricated from an imagination of cultural
identity.)
