Time Stitches

The fragments and cinematic vignettes that make up Eleni Kefala’s first poetry collection to appear in English are themselves the titular “time stitches,” poems woven by the fates. Kefala threads together multiple narratives, each of which plays with chronology and temporality in a different way: we learn of the poet’s Cypriot grandfather’s youth and emigration to England as World War II begins, of a 16th century Cardinal who meets his demise during the Reformation, of a sailor on Christopher Columbus’s La Pinta glimpsing the Americas, and, as translator Peter Constantine explains, of “the great Aztec Emperor Montezuma—from the first portents of doom to the moment his empire falls to the Spanish conquistadors.” 

Reading Time Stitches felt like watching an art film in which disparate scenes from various places and eras are cut together, leaving the viewer to draw connections and make meaning from the juxtapositions. Kefala’s writing, and Constantine’s dexterous translation of the book’s many registers, is most affecting in the poems about the poet’s grandfather as a Cypriot villager, his hunger, head injury, and his trouble with the informal English test, which he must pass in order to emigrate:

           […] he says shut thee doar I
shut the door he asked me the
same question and I said mai
brothar-in-lo OK he says you
passed

The narrative poems in this book are punctuated by several series of short lyrics, one titled “Poetry,” which begins, simply, “the redistribution of silence / in language.” Another series is titled “Nomad,” and while I could not square the idea of “nomad” with the book as a whole, migration (and the power dynamics and irreversible changes that spark or follow migration) is an important motif here. The seemingly erratic formatting of the “nomad” poems concretizes themes of wandering and scattering, and in poem “XVIII” of the series, past and present converge:

the days are feasting
they are forming and destroying
histories