Anthony Seidman reviews George Kalmaras’s To Sleep In The Horse’s Belly in the North American Review.
George Kalamaras has proved to be a formidable and unique presence in English-language North American poetry, starting from the 1990s to the present day. His work first grabbed the readers’ gaze with such collections as Even the Java Sparrows Call Your Hair and Kingdom of Throat-Stuck Luck. The reader familiar with the electric excursions into surrealism by North American poets like Gene Frumkin and Philip Lamantia quickly realized a new voice had emerged, one that twisted sense and syntax, made wild metaphoric leaps, and tapped his energy from the best of Latin American poetry, European poetry in the vein of Desnos and others, as well as classical and modern Greek poets. Classical and modern Greek poets, perhaps emphatically so. Ethnically Greek (three of his four grandparents emigrated to the United States), Kalamaras was speaking with more than one voice (as do so many wonderful poets). The poems that he crafted formed a bouquet of such striking juxtapositions as: “Examine my hands, on which you’ll see the staph infections of eels. / Rust spots below my eyes suggest the guise of an underwater guitar.” Or: “The shoes of my mouth walk off with my tongue / The shoes of my tongue walk off with my mouth / […] The shoes of my saliva lubricate my brain.” The reader knew a bonfire was blazing on the horizon.
