A desire to see more clearly colours the poems in Alice Kavounas’ collection One Step at a Time as they migrate, via the Prague Spring and the Coachella Valley, from 19th Century Turkey to ‘the ancient ophiolitic ground’ of present-day Cornwall. Kavounas is driven by an ‘obsession for observation’ and displays a very fine attention to detail. But birds remind her repeatedly of her shortsightedness, and she marvels at their more far-reaching vision. She says of the owl in particular:
Even Athena needed an owl
to help her see the truth.
Why not me, here on earth?
Athena’s presence in these lines is no accident; given Kavounas’ Greek heritage, her mention of the goddess hints at her conviction that close attention to the past will reward us with wisdom. Much like the
deep sea diver
whose ocean floor exploratory
has yielded ancient wrecks, glittering treasures.
A careful interest in—or rather a reverence for—the past, guides many of the journeys Kavounas makes in these poems. Her curiosity ranges from personal to political, from the microscopic to the monumental; often, it examines the interplay between the two. Of her father’s hometown Aivali, Turkey, where 150,000 ethnic Greeks were violently persecuted in the First World War, and to which, we learn, he was never to return once he had been driven out:
Somewhere in that hinterland is more than just your farm.
That vast expanse conceals the bodies of your parents
left to die along with all who stumbled to their death
their bloodline tracing forward into future generations
extending back, and back – like all these criss-crossing lines
on this wrinkled map.
This sense of movement (‘I’ve always been nomadic’) and, in particular, uprooting (‘Blown south by instinct, chance / and circumstance’) is pervasive. But Kavounas’ backward glance, her refusal to forget, is searching and considered. It is occasionally too personal but never nostalgic. She is aware, too, of the dangers, of the more harmful ways in which such a refusal might manifest. A friend’s mother exhumes her collection of fur coats from a refrigerator:
The alphabetic order of it all, the idea that this roll call of the wild
would somehow revive her, or at the very least, that these ghosts
of creatures, trapped in the desert, could offer comfort.
One for each day of the week, she whispered, almost to herself
What other consequences come of all this movement and contingency? For Kavounas, they raise questions of who she is and how to cross the gap between herself and other people. It is the latter she stresses most. There are desperate breakdowns in communication—with a brother, with a lover—that may or not be recovered; there is grief for a father who could never return home; and there is simple disappearance (‘utterly unforgettable people / who insist on vanishing before my waking eye’). But there is also something stoic, even hopeful, that Kavounas threads into the seams of her sentences, that remains despite all she sees in the past, and which turns our heads from yesterday to today; and also, to tomorrow.
Samuel Bowerman 2nd July 2024
