MEMORY REHEARSAL

A poet’s immersion in Greek classicism forges a stronger bond with her bloodline.

This is the concluding and most ambitious volume of an unclassifiable trilogy—one that mixes poetry with poetically charged prose, memoir with flights of creative fancy, and archival photos and drawings that document a past obscured to the author when she had embarked on this quest. “I was traveling backwards toward her in the dark,” Sikelianos writes. “And she was hurtling forwards toward me in the dark, in time’s dark travel, like two concentrated figures who’d lost their human outlines.” As chronology collapses, this book illuminates that darkness and gives flesh to those outlines. The focus is on the unlikely marriage of the author’s great-grandparents. Eva Palmer was a New York socialite transplanted to Greece, where she encountered and married the poet Angelos Sikelianos. She was a seductress who preferred women; he was a cultural visionary who claimed to eat only honey. Their collaboration sparked a revival of interest in Greek ritual and pageantry through a series of Delphic festivals. Eventually and inevitably, they split. He remained renowned in his homeland; she returned to America, destitute, and faded into obscurity. In the author’s attempts to retrieve and reclaim that legacy, benefiting from a scholarly resurgence of interest in Palmer, she embarked on a quest similar to Eva’s, bonding the present with the past, renewing herself with what had been all but forgotten. While piecing together Eva’s life and legacy, Sikelianos picks up the pieces of her own past: from a destitute child within a broken family through a life shaped by poetry, passion, wanderlust, and serendipity—as if she were following the lead of a woman she had never known.

A moving family memoir and a triumph of cultural archaeology.