POLYTROPOS

A book of poems that toggles between the head and the heart.

Tripoulas combines philosophical ponderings with indelible memories. He opens with “Fish Hooks,” a contemplation of bronze fish hooks from the 4th century BCE, preserved behind glass at the Piraeus Archeological Museum in Greece. He notes that despite “centuries beneath the sea,” they’re the same shape of hooks found in tackle stores today. While in Florence, Italy, the speaker of “Ekphrastic Theology” realizes that “Uffizi’s many Annunciations / often portray literate Mary / with book in hand. In “Asemic,” the speaker observes that Buddha, Christ, and Socrates never held a pen, perhaps because “Only their disciples turned to / written manifestation (manus, hand), / trying to make revelation / tangible, like grasping the wind.” Other poems have a more modern, personal tone; “Insomnia” recalls a grandfather’s cigarettes singeing "the skin of his two fingers / and turning them yellow.” Still others tell stories that are certain to surprise readers, such as “Mike Gabel in Hell,” in which a deceased friend visits the speaker in a dream to inform him that the friend didn’t die by suicide, but that his wife murdered him—a dream proven true when police reinvestigate the friend’s death. Tripoulas is primarily a philosophical poet, which can occasionally make for cumbersome lines, such as “Opposites are one, / wrote the Riddler, / like lyre and bow they beget / the clashing power / of polar strife.” (“Looking for Heraclitus in the Samaria Gorge”). Other works can be quite dark, such as “Faces Are Silent Words,” inspired by a 10-year-old girl who drowned during a refugee crossing: “Her face is missing, scoured by sea brine, / her small nose eaten by fish.” Whenever the poet turns his gaze toward nature, he does so stunningly, as in this evocative description of autumn: “leaves swoon to their death / like costumed tragic actors. / Bereft bare branches / high above, grieve.” (“Two Views of Autumn”). Throughout, the author unearths remarkable truths about what he sees as timeless and universal in the human experience.

An intellectually stimulating and emotionally resonant collection.