Hobblebush Books

REVIEW OF Earth Listening by Becky Sakellariou
Adrianne Kalfopoulou (Cider Press Review, Volume 12)

Becky Sakellariou’s debut collection, Earth Listening (2010) is a book to celebrate. One of the many wonders of these poems is their ability to return us to the sensation of being in the presence of an ancient lyric voice that sings a soul’s awe in the face of life. It is this sense of the unexpected that permeates all of Sakellariou’s encounters. And her gift is that no matter the losses there is always an element of rapture in the language: “I lean into the hour,/that grey watered time//between body dark and the spirit daybreak,/my eyelids as silent as this moment.//...I never believed I could be desperate,//but I hear hushed moans,/...oak beams torn in two, window frames askew,/doors splintered open, and I suddenly know desperation.//” (from “The Sound of Birds Crying”). And then in “All the Missing”, this ecstatic prayer: “I beg you/let me call you Mehrem/one more time,/the you that I am./Let me borrow under your skin,/enter your body, sleep inside/the liquid of your mouth,/and we will no longer need redemption.//”

Sakellariou’s poems are a refreshing welcome to the much-aggravated terrain of the too-self-conscious and precious in a good deal of contemporary poetry, her unabashed inclusiveness “will greet with song/anything that comes to me” (“Startled Earth”); and as she puts it in her poem “Into the No” that seems to address the threat of succumbing to the sheer accumulation of life’s negatives, she has “come/to pick through the grit/” until she reaches “sweet luminous earth.”

One of my favorite poems in the collection, “A Long Finish of Fruit” seamlessly weaves moments, or details, of a Greek antiquity with a personal present. The speaker muses on the cliffs where “great slabs of marble/were cut...to build the Parthenon./” where “three thousand years ago,/men ran between Marathon/and the base camp with news/of ships/invasion, a possible truce.//” but “On this day” the speaker admires the grape vines that “seek the light.” She learns about “the barrels” and “fermenting,/wine that takes like lemon,” and repeats the Greek words she hears: “Xynomavro,/Agioritiko, Moschofilero, grapes grown/nowhere else but Greece.//” The foreign words take on the resonance of the landscape with its scents of sage and wild onion and “dusk orange” colors, and express a transformative moment much like the gradual transformation of fermenting grapes into wine.

Just as the ancient, and not-so-ancient past feeds into the poet’s present, so too the images in the poem, strike me as a kind of ars poetica for Sakellariou’s whole poetic effort, as much of the strength of this collection lies in how Sakellariou has wedded her experiences to the much larger histories of place and identity; she speaks as a lover might to what might seem less extraordinary to one uninspired by (or less in love with?) their world. She so continuously dreams “the heart sound/that takes wing/” and “sings...into the marvelous,/the farthest opening in the sky.” (from “Dreaming a Butterfly) that we are swept up in the journey with her.

Greece and New England (especially New Hampshire) make up the main worlds of Earth Listening, New Hampshire being Sakellariou’s native homeland while Greece has been her adopted home for her adult life. This collection might be a first book, but it is rich in many, many, lives, as if the Muse found in Sakellariou an Emersonian empathy for all that Sappho might have fallen in love with.

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