REVIEW of Niki Koulouris’ The sea with no one in it
The sea with no one in it
Porcupine’s Quill
October 2013
ISBN: 978-0889843639
64 pages
reviewed by Georgia Kreiger
From the borders between ocean and shore, sea and sky, the voice of Niki Koulouris’ The sea with no one in it speaks. More importantly, though, the voice of this collection of poems positions the reader at the nexus of the image that imprints itself upon the perceiver’s mind and its apt expression in language on the page. In Koulouris’ verse, the sea serves as backdrop for the populace of images that arrive like tides on wave after wave of poetic lines and subside into starless darkness with each poem’s final word.
Koulouris’ collection is divided into two parts. The first consists of twenty poems connected by a coterie of images: waves and tides; ships, shields, torches, crosses, and flags; the shore and “the un-numbered stars.” Some lines are spoken to such formidable classical seafarers as Theseus and Icarus. A pantheon of constellations—lion, bear, elephant—reflects upon the water’s surface, as fish sail its undercurrents. The voice of these poems defines the artistic mission of the work, declaring, “I’ve seen the ocean once / and I know it has potential,” after which the imaginative potential of this setting is plumbed. The final poem of the first part of the book reveals that the effort has yielded more than can be conveyed, so that the setting itself is obscured, as the voice wonders “what has become of the ocean outnumbered by waves.”
The second part consists of a set of twenty-three predominantly ekphrastic works, some dedicated to artists such as Anselm Kiefer, Philip Guston, Jackson Pollock, Maurice Sendak, and Cézanne. In these verses, the sea is re-envisioned in the speaker’s response to visual artworks. To Kiefer, the promise: “I will prove / you have painted Nero’s ocean,” and the observation, “we can lose track forever / of a wave in the ocean.” And to Pollock, the sea is found in a new iteration in one poem’s opening lines: “In a pact with an owl / you wade through / the cramped reflections on a lake.” The final poem returns the reader to the borders that have thematized the collection, as the voice asserts, “It’s always midnight / in the river / between two poems.”
Unique in this collection is Koulouris’ employment of negation as a conceptual premise for many of the poems. As the verses become cluttered by symbols that ride the waves of thought, the speaker endeavors to clear the conceptual field of the poems, instructing the reader, for instance, “Don’t mention / the sea / her great hide / for she is perfect / without a shield / a torch / an ending.” To envision the sea, the speaker suggests, involves the inevitable entry of a flotilla of imagined objects and contexts. These must be swept away, because, “you can’t go on / exactly like this / chanting until / the ocean is complete / for her waves / will never be yours…” The sea, like a palimpsest, must be purged of its symbolism so that a new layer of thought may be introduced.
The imperative to empty the scene of its symbolic potential, however, may have the opposite effect on the reader. As the speaker prompts readers not to imagine a setting or an object, that setting or object inevitably imposes itself upon the mind. The speaker seems to make a sport of negation, cueing the reader with lines such as “I do not think of the deep” in order to imagine just that, or with comments such as “The sea does not need lions in it / needless elephants and bears…” to inspire the reader to imagine the play of constellations reflected on the water’s surface. Through the use of negation, Koulouris creates a tension that holds her verses aloft over a current of images, repeatedly reminding the reader to examine the alternative potential of what is not, to recognize that “Today of all days / this is the sea with no one in it.”
Koulouris’ first collection of poetry, The sea with no one in it reveals its author’s ability to discover the unexplored within a familiar context by both positing and negating its symbolic potential. The poems exhibit the poet’s vision of the sea as a rich ground for the emerging and subsiding figures it calls forth to the imagination.
Georgia Kreiger lives in Michigan. She teaches creative writing at Concordia University–Ann Arbor, whose Kreft Arts Program hosts a variety of poets and writers. She is a member of A Gathering of Women Writers, a coalition devoted to supporting the work of Ann Arbor area women writers.