A Little Sand

by George Pavlopulos. Translated by Darlene Fife. 64 pages. Published by Bookstore, 104 S. Jefferson Street, Lewisburg, West Virginia 24901.

Book Review by Michael Basinski

I ponder the fashion in which memory and poetry interact. And was pleased to find this a theme of George Pavlopulos’s poems.

He writes in TORTURE

I am not the body you loved
but that which you want to remember
and that which you can't remember
and that which you think you remember.

Memory and sensuality and love, longing and desire are ripe here in this poet who understands that poetry resides in an other place, a place of only the poem. And in that place of poetry is the seat of love. Darlene Fife’s translations from the Greek, which is also provided in the text, more than adequately captures the emotionally lush language of the original intent, intensity. This is a poetry of the pounding, longing heart. On my shelf, I place with book next to Mary Barnard’s translations of Sappho and Pound’s Love Poems of Ancient Egypt. One’s faith is restored by the fact of love and love’s music, which is love’s poetry.