Stelios Mormoris
Perishable
Tupelo Press
Reviewer: Jeanne Julian
As the title suggests, the shadow of our mortality hovers over the poems in Perishable. This full-length collection, Mormoris’s second, contemplates death and loss, from witnessing mourners at a funeral to envisioning one’s own funeral in “Arrangements.” Images of knives eerily recur in unexpected contexts, little swords of Damocles. Knives are seen in skyscrapers, the gleam of the horizon, serrated leaves: “death: lunar / side of crisp / silver knife” (“Interruptus”).
That darkness is balanced by enlightening encounters with the strange and beautiful. The portrait of an aging prostitute in “Old Girl” is fascinating, repellant, and sad all at once—like Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard. A sensual encounter with a mushroom calls us to pay attention to the smallest marvels. Language in all of these poems invites us to read them aloud, to revel in sometimes impudent sounds: “thistle, chicory, and Queen Anne’s lace / prickly and intricate and full of trickery” (“Homage to Weeds”); “watching the wakes of salmon / whir the water into clear liqueur” (“The Stream”).
Mormoris’s ability to make it new, as Ezra Pound said, lets us see even the ordinary in a startling light. He pares away sentimentality from the well-worn symbol of “La Tour Eiffel” with an irreverent account of a naked opera singer commandeering the famous tower and the lonely “headlights of dispassion” revolving around its spindle. In “Ode to Herringbone,” Mormoris examines iterations of that everyday pattern, discovered in tinned fish, parquet, jackets. He takes it apart and reassembles it. Even the lines on the page are arranged to echo the subject:
as if someone slit the crossties
right up the middle then shifted
back the rails evenly on each side.
But this is not merely clever description. The poem deepens with mystery and emotion. Just as “closer inspection” reveals the “broken skeleton” of herringbone, the speaker tries to discern “a pattern beneath // a pattern,” the “grains and hues” in someone else—a stranger? a lover? Other poems display this same acuity. The delicious tale of a feast in “Watermelon”—the rind “cool as a bouquet of wind”—ends with guests casting off their “charade of decorum … // unable to cherish, or think” as they primitively “dig in,” devouring “babies from the garden.”
One of the strengths of this collection is the variety of forms Mormoris employs. “Yiá Yiá” and “Perishable” are narratives dedicated to Mormoris’s grandmother and grandfather, respectively. The poet uses different forms to paint two distinct portraits, each a wonderful evocation of his Greek heritage. “Yiá Yiá” involves a gift of fireflies in a jar, communion with a coiffed and silver-braceleted matriarch, and conflicting feelings about a child’s absent father. In contrast with the magical sequence of short-lined tercets in “Yiá Yiá,” “Perishable” concludes the book with over fifteen long stanzas, so well-crafted that at first you don’t realize you’re reading a single sentence. The poem tells a story of another warm relationship as a boy accompanies his immigrant grandfather, a gardener, to work on a grand estate. Sharp details and the momentum of the delivery carry you along to the last line with its play on the word “iris”:
… it was then it struck me how his eyes dark as the blue Aegean
he left for a life in America burdened him, that he could peer into the souls
of flowers …
… as he slipped the paper ring off his Cuban cigar before his last smoke
and coasted down the serpentine incline under a pelt of rain,
his fist on the gear, his grandiloquent iris turning in on itself.
In describing himself, Mormoris has said he entertains a “delusion: that I am descendant of Greek mythology—not of Zeus, probably of Poseidon, who sped across water with ideas and anger and love in his heart.” So perhaps it is in homage to the Greeks that Mormoris’s leitmotif of water flows throughout his poems. References to ponds, salmon in a stream, a sailor navigating “the bight’s current,” the “shoal of an argument,” swimming in “swirls of fish,” and “blackish water” (in both “Indigo” and “Mushroom”) submerge us in a watery, liminal world, both literal and figurative. “Belle-Île,” the first poem in the book, describes an underwater liaison. “Vespers,” concluding the Lamentations section, places a passionate couple
in shadows of plankton
under the aqua lagoon
mirror, flotilla of wishes
in tow: holding hands on
our drive to work, bathing
in a glass bell inverted
in the sea …
We see the danger and risk in this inhospitable element, but also sense the beauty and the redemption of emergence, of baptism. The poem “It Is My Revolution” suggests this idea of rebirth: “And I wonder if it is possible to be / reborn with grace.”
The book is in three sections: Lamentations, Flora Mortis, and Perishable. Lamentations recalls the Bible’s book of that name, a story of ruin and despair. Yes, these poems speak of “learning to lose,” as in “Indigo.” The poem “Sigh:,” with its signpost of a colon in the title, guides us to contemplate “the breath of what was” in a euphonious litany of yearning. But these poems evoke more than laments. There’s a melancholy in contemplating the lost old city in “Baltimore Spring,” yet on a glorious day, “the city opens its arms!” In “Eau de Parfum,” dedicated to the poet’s mother, aromas of cooking call up vivid, mingled scents from the past. She lives again in memory.
As his biography tells us, Mormoris heads a company that makes fragrances, creating “scents to kindle memory, intimacy, confidence and sex.” His poems have the same effect. They are redolent not only with losses and regrets, but also with exhilarating awareness. Like that of a young boy tailing a sexy woman in “Spangled,” our limited time on a perishable planet offers interludes of “breathless delight.”
