Marina Zografou’s Poetry

There is a widespread impression that experience is something which, with the passage of time, happens to everyone, that exposure to objective conditions automatically generates the ability to perceive and understand them. Thus a poet of the stature of Marina Zografou who has spent several years writing poetry is usually said to be “experienced” in it modern psychology and logic have made it abundantly clear that no such generation of experience takes place. Not only objective conditions but active interest, alert senses, an open mind, a store of knowledge already in hand, and a systematic reflection on the part of the poet, are the indispensable conditions of any discriminating sensitivity to the world around her.

Perception furnishes the material of experiences through a process of active intercourse on the part of the poet towards her environment. Every living being is constantly undergoing stimulation from some external object, responding, and reacting to the effects of that response, as in the poem “Nazi”.

I lived in the age of the poor
In the war’s cold December
When muffled bodies
Dried by the touch of law.
Arrows of hate darkness depths
The Nazi criminals sucked the blood
In luxurious gardens.

The course of Zografou’s poetry demonstrates this understanding of nature, of the human condition, of love and loss. She rises above distinctions of race, colour and creed. For example, in her poem “Pablo Neruda”.

With white sandals
You walked
The earth’s wreath
Night of life.
Launched dreams.
I heard the bells
Of Valparaiso, soul.
Breath, Neruda.
Forms of developments
Mother of fresh twigs smell
Of a pink emotion...

which is full of emotion for the dead poet whom she compares to a Christ like risen figure.

Poem after poem in the two books under review are an attempt to create or recreate some experience, apprehending both the physical and the spiritual in a convergent, almost indistinguishable way. Her instincts are towards a language which is telling, rather than exuberant. Above all, she wishes to initiate, in the mind of the reader, an experience of the unnamable parallel to that, which she constructs or elicits – as she writes.

The books contain various poems about the way atmosphere, moods, and silences, persist in the mind. This may be where the title. “Symphony of the Stars”, comes from. The poems seem to specifically evoke epiphanies, short movements, and the harmonies of a piece of music, as in the following:

In harmonies of birds
By the fountains
Silence of peacocks
In an epoch of inductions.
I embraced the player of essence
In schools of methods I read the beauty
Waves elevate me to money, glory.
Love, sirens upset me
And I understand, I love...

(“Waves”)

All poetry is written out of compromise. Whatever strengths a writer has are usually at the expense of other elements in his or her writing. If I do have a query about Zografou’s poetry, it is that the very deliberateness which enables the poet to be so precise in her language, while making things beautifully open for the mind of the reader, can sometimes make it sit oddly with respect to the rhapsody and openness of her intention.

If she is hardly the mistress of stylistic innovation Zografou has set herself a broad variety of worlds to write about. Think about these (dare I call them) obsessions: dreams, love, music, dance, the sea; and contemporary life. When her attention is focussed on Art/Music/Europe etc., I feel in the company of an articulate museum guide. And am I engaged? Moderately, sometimes. Poetry ought to give us the kind of surprises, reevaluations, that poetry on the familiar simply has to supply in order to survive. And I don’t always feel this happening in Zografou’s work. On the other hand, there are certainly some great lines in the poems. Some are full of eternal desire and hope. The poems may not be comprehended after one reading by a materialistic or negative reader. Some of her best poems are those where her philosophy flows through the words to encompass the spirituality and voice which catches the attention of the reader.