The Second Home by Vasiliki Katsarou

What is home?  In Bishop’s poem “Questions of Travel”, she asks, “Should we have stayed at home, wherever that may be?”  Vasiliki Katsarou inhabits at least two homes in The Second Home, though one senses there are many homes, many mansions, being referenced in these spare and emotionally honest poems: memory, imagination, personal history, family history, offspring—all such phenomena operate as homes for the mind.  Home is also language, and Katsarou herself lives and works in a trilingual world of Greek, French and English.  In a short poem called “Germinal”, referencing the seventh month of the French Revolutionary calendar, she notices how “in spring/lines become volumes” and how “now things must be accounted for/in at least three dimensions.” In the poem, “We Would Wed Our Words,” Katsarou writes “if language is static/it is to prevent us from hearing a true signal//if language is a tool/to wedge us into an economy of wants//why yes, there is an endless supply of demand.” Katsarou’s poetry is rich in such signals.

–Regan Good, author of The Needle and The Atlantic House

What pleasure it has been to discover the fresh voice of poet Vasiliki Katsarou. The author of the poems in The Second Home sounds like no other. I savored her resonant phrasing and stunning use of metaphor, as in the poem “Ekta-chrome”: “last look upon home,/a café on the village square, the field, its harvest of exile//pellucid Pelasgia/partial coinage of a man-made image”. I found this work compelling in its movement as it gathers up the fragments of a glimpsed past and future, home and exile, and transfigures them into a new vision.

–Nicholas Samaras, author of Hands of the Saddlemaker, and American Psalm, World Psalm

These poems by Vasiliki Katsarou are elusive. Like water trickling through fingers they seep in, slip away, go somewhere unexpected. They aren’t confined to the page. They have the lingering effect of a ghazal, where the experience of reading them is added to the poem itself. There is no quibbling with Katsarou’s craft- the internal rhyme, the generous spaces surrounding stanzas, establish an unmistakable cadence. These poems are not for a lazy reader. They invite attention and rereading, and reward those who do.

–MaryAnn L. Miller, author of Locus Mentis and Cures for Hysteria