Poetry Review: When You Said No, Did You Mean Never? is poetry with a sprinkling of science and learned facts. Although the poems are fashionably opaque, most end with a striking and emotionally resonant last line. Many of the poems are short, which I like, and tend to have a few lines relating to science or other fields of learning: from WWI gas masks to the Heimlich maneuver to Carnegie controlling the price of steel, grammar, Greek, influenza, chemistry, etc. etc. Generally the factoids work, tho when incorrect it becomes confusing -- did Papageorgiou mean to give a false fact or was it a mistake? Her work certainly provokes thought, which should be any good writer's aim. Even the book title, When You Said No, Did You Mean Never? is provocative, and maybe a poem all by itself. Here's a short one:
"Dark Matter"
In physics we call it dark
because it doesn't radiate.
In Greece it can be stork nests in the bell tower,
moss on the flagstones,
a dull pain in the sky.
A character named Karen (apparently a stand-in for the author) wanders through the book, which was intriguing and worked well for me. Some poems, especially toward the end, gave up some of the science for a bigger share of human emotions, which generally were more successful. The poems often contain aphorisms and epigrams too, which are usually well done, tho again, when they're unconvincing one wonders what it means, but at least one wonders!
"It's Better with the Cracks"
Influenza viruses come from birds not humans;
even cold lakes get sick because of them.
The man who stepped out for a newspaper
and never came back
lives inside us all.
A volume well worth reading, certainly an individual voice, and based on the last poems of When You Said No, Did You Mean Never?, I'm curious to see what Papageorgiou will do next. [3 Stars]
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