Böcker av Alice Kavounas

"Whether Alice Kavounas is walking the bounds of her home in Cornwall, speaking across time to her brother, or wryly contemplating two funerary caskets, one containing a dog's ashes, the other those of a family member, her poems are distinguished by clarity of observation, by wit, and by individual grace. We go from Cornwall to San Francisco to New York; to Minsk, London, and Palm Springs; always her voice is measured, searching. She is interested in scale; in minutiae, as in her beautiful study of a painting of a finch, or in finding herself a holidaying bystander in 1968, witnessing tanks enroute to the invasion of former Czechoslovakia. This acutely-assembled collection is rich in such telling intersections, and her narrative energy is flawless. She follows threads of thought and memory and imagination with exact insight and compassion. She reminds us that unless we give honour and attention to the past, we are lost. Her poems are rich in those qualities that we require of poems, so that we may better comprehend and celebrate our human lives." -Penelope Shuttle

Abandoned Gardens is a powerful and essential distillation from this poet's three collections, plus a substantial volume of new work. Locales range from the poet's native America, to her family roots in Greece, and to the UK. Letting go of places and people is a key theme.

Thin Ice takes the reader on an odyssey of the imagination, with poems whose sources range from a childhood in Maine, to NYC of the Vietnam era, to our paranoid post-9/11 world. There is a measure of relief in the quotidian pleasures of our beleaguered natural environment, whether from a terrace on a Greek island, or the poet's garden in Cornwall.

Features daring personal stories and quotidian moments. This title refers to Smyrna, the author's father's city. It takes us on an intimate, international journey which crosses continents, evokes physical as well as psychological landscapes, and confronts such issues as: forced migration, the immigrant experience, and the elusive idea of 'home'.