Review by Karla Huston

YAYA'S CLOTH by Andrea Potos   Iris Press 969 Oak Ridge Turnpike # 328 Oak Ridge, TN 37830 ISBN: 978-0-916078-65-2 (cloth) $24.00 ISBN: 978-0-91078-66-9 (paper) $14.00 www.irisbooks.com

 
Gestures from Long Ago

Marge Piercy, in an interview in the Writer's Chronicle (May/Summer 2004), says, "Writers strive to make sense of the events of our lives and try to find a pattern that proves where we are has some meaning." Piercy adds that after writing about a particular memory, it "metamorphosizes into something else strange and different."
 
In this, her first full collection of poems, Andrea Potos relies on memory--hers and the memories of others--to find those patterns that create who she is as wife, mother, daughter, and granddaughter. Memory is the medium in which she travels the terrain of her Greek ancestry, a landscape she honors through poetic explorations of (mostly) the female ancestors. It is, perhaps, through these memories that Potos discovers and creates her own heritage.

some necessity
steeped in your blood,
perhaps from your grandmother,
that woman who loved you
with a heart scoured by loss.

Many are compelled to write from memory, as much as by what they see outside their windows, but Potos' explorations rely on her need to remember the woman who loved her unconditionally, the woman she recognizes in her own hair, her own hands, her daughter's sweet face, her heart.
 
Divided into four sections, the first delves into narratives about family members--grandparents and aunts, sisters and uncles, many deceased but still alive through the stories she's been told, the stories she carries. The preface poem explains this need to find the place of "greatest beauty":

The driftless area
is where I want to reside--
land the glaciers did not
grind down, flatten
with the force of deep ice,
leaving only broken
rocks in their wake.
There is the sweeping
dance of valley and hill,
the greatest beauty where loss
has been left to the elements,
sculpting its own natural shape.

In addition to memory, some say men record their histories with facts and battles, a timeline of triumphs and tragedies. Women, on the other hand, often document their histories in more domestic ways--through cooking, sewing, and the care and feeding of family. In these poems, readers are introduced to fine linens, silks from worms carefully fed with gathered mulberry leaves, and succulent Greek recipes and traditions.
 
At the heart of this book is Potos' Yaya, Greek for grandmother, Aristea who has taught Potos how to make the recipes, to create the delicious kitchen scents, to care for the linens--all the stuff of which women's legacies are made. Yaya is the grandmother who does what women have always done: survive. This survival comes at the death of her three-year-old son, Tommy, from a tragic accident. Potos wonders:

where was the angel
to scoop him up in her wings
just before he fell into that pot of boiling broth
the cook set out to cool...

This sad loss is an event that shaped not only Yaya's life but Potos' as well, when she imagines him an adult, with his own family: "my flesh and blood / who might have given me airplane rides with his arms..." This Tommy would have been her adored uncle, one she never had the opportunity to know and to love.
 
Another way women create and perpetuate their histories is through gossip, even though some anecdotes may take on mythological proportions. And so it is with men's stories of great battles, legendary and heroic deeds; these fabled acts are not so different from ladies gossiping over "kitchen tables, fingers patting // floral oilcloths as they sipped / their percolated coffee...as they spoke // of what could not be contained: / the news, like love, that must be shared."
 
The record of Potos' family follows through subsequent sections of the book and further explores the landscape of survival, a passage that finally takes the author to the birth of her own daughter and the tugs and pulls of motherhood, a journey that ends with a trip to Greece to the heart of her heritage, where she says:

Should I admit my urges to kneel
on the Acropolis stones,
how I actually did,
lay on the Hill of the Muses,

How glorious it must have been to arrive at the place of her grandmother's birth. Finally as it often is, language is the code that connects her. And when she makes her first, tentative sounds while learning the Greek words, Potos says:

I begin them as a chore:
...
I am finding the sounds,
pieces of my grandmother’s voice
flowing through my throat
...
eenay--it is, eemay--I am.

Finally, there is more to these poems than the history of a family, the love of a grandmother. Within these wonderfully crafted pieces, Potos does what a good poet does. She is conveyed on two vehicles, one of authenticity for story, and the other of language, a voice crafted of sound and rhythm, sense and image. It can be heard in her lovely diction, her delicious word choices, dripping like the honey of her grandmother's baklava. Yet, all is not always sweet. In the poem, Self-Doubts, Potos considers her uncertainties using sensory images that irritate and bother the reader as much as she is bothered:

They stick,
my socks prickled
with burrs, those barnacles
of the field; they suck at
the hem of my coat, my sleeves
...
Worse, they turn to splinters
wedged
under the tender lip of skin.

Her poem Crocheting in Autumn rhythmically replicates the in-and-out movement of the crochet hook. The story weaves its own tapestry--the notion that the tale is never finished but only a work in progress. The narrator says, "I would be Penelope, undoing // her work each night, so as never / to reach the end of // this wool..."

At the heart of this fine book of poems is always the honor Potos bestows to her family and her heritage, to the history she keeps writing and rewriting. Like Penelope and the fabric of which a life is made, Potos is a poet who does not want to finish. Even so, as Piercy suggests, once memory is released, it becomes "something else strange and different." In the hands of a good writer, memory is something beautiful that must be given away again and again to be appreciated.

___________