An Almost Pure Empty Walking.

An Almost Pure Empty Walking by Tryfon Tolides, Penguin Books, 2006, $16.00 paper, ISBN 9780143037095.

Winner of the 2005 National Poetry Series, Tryfon Tolides' debut collection, An Almost Pure Empty Walking, addresses a diverse set of themes ranging from the personal to the social, from loss and nostalgia to displacement and global conflict. Central to Tolides's poetry is the image of the Greek landscape. In a poem set in Mount Athos, a place in Northern Greece known as a site for religious pilgrimage, the beauty of the landscape creates a space within which the poet can cultivate his capacity for observation:

the Aegean
ripples with infinite small lights, the trees
of the mountain move like the sea, the air brings
a mixed scent of pine and iodine and night.
Beauty is more evident in this quiet. You see it
through a clearing inside yourself.

In a similar vein, Tolides views folk wisdom as a shaping influence for poetic creation. "The First Thing: Ousia" centers on the notion of extracting the essence of things, be it over-ripened fruit or marrow from soup bones. The essence, or ousia, is a metaphor for the desire to return to the elemental nature of common experience:

In my village,
they say certain pears are best eaten after they've fallen to the ground
and been there a few days, their bruises grown. The fruit attains its
                                                                 fullest
flavor then, just as with certain soups, you have to suck the bones
of their marrow to get the ousia, the essence, the best part.

For Tolides, the village signifies the desire to return to origins and is envisioned as a place in which one can engage in the recovery of family history. In "Almond Tree," the poet pines for a village located somewhere in Northern Greece, amid other "voices from Tirane and Skopje" that emanate from the radio waves. He longingly recalls its rich textures, hues, and sounds: "I miss smashing the green-covered shells,/peeling the bitter skin, putting the slippery seed/on my tongue"; and "I miss the bundles of tree limbs, the crackling fires,/the crazy bright fields of tan and clover." Elsewhere, in "I Will Sweep," the narrator, who returns to his home in the village, commands himself to perform routine chores around the house and poignantly reconnects with family members who have died: "Sweep, clean, tidy up, my arm repeating/a motion until I am woven with my dead into a clear/and living braid."

At the poetry's core is the voice of the immigrant, sometimes in the guise of the plaintive mother, sometimes the reflective son. In "Immigrant," the unnamed homeland is juxtaposed with the dystopia that is America:

My mother called this morning, kept trailing away,
or off, with complaints about her failure
to make it, alone in the house, the night being
long, no one to talk to, blaming, in part, America,
hating the mess we've found, or made this year.
"What is America?" she said. "A hole in the water.
What have we gained but poison and illness?"
Her whole message a cry.

America, at least for this immigrant, has not fulfilled expectations. Far from being a place in which to realize dreams, it is equated with the inability to attain them. Similarly, the poem, "My Mother's Room," conveys the idea of thwarted hopes through the image of suitcases "lugging and dispersing hope as they did/back and forth across the ocean/all those years."

Yet, while Tolides remains attentive to his ancestral roots, equally present in this rich collection is ample reference to the American landscape. One is struck by the pristine character of nature--whether in America or Greece--set against the destructiveness of global conflict in poems such as "Watering," "More Sense," and "Enduring Freedom." Thus, in the broader context, Tolides's penchant for the pastoral Suggests both nostalgia and a proclivity for social critique.