“It is the serene beauty of his [Katsaropoulos’] writing that mesmerizes and results in starting the book again once finished that proves this is a man of letters who has an enormous gift and future. COMPLEX KNOWING is most assuredly one of the more important collections of poetry by an American writer to come before the public….we can only hope that he will pause frequently to offer poems such as these.”
~Grady HarpPoet, War Songs Critic, Literary Aficionado, Art Historian, The Art of Man and Vitruvian Lens and PoetsArtistsWriter for art museum catalogues
FULL REVIEW~
COMPLEX KNOWING
Everything outside our little tube of limitation is more than we can ever hope to know. Occasionally a diamond so settled in the crust of the earth can go unnoticed, perhaps lacking the light it requires to send dazzling prisms to the eyes of the chaotic mass of shufflers preoccupied with the instant gratification of technologies competing with the air itself for push-button attention. Such is the case with this mesmerizing collection of poems COMPLEX KNOWING by the Indiana writer Chris Katsaropoulos, a book so eloquent and brilliant that it requires time – that precious entity few seem to have saved for exploration of the arts – to explore this obvious treasure. It is related to the great works of literature – James Joyce, T.S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, Solzhenitsyn, Dante Alighieri, Roberto Bolaño, Seamus Heaney, Proust, Kazantzakis, Kafka, William Blake, and Percy Bysshe Shelley are a few that come to mind. We have been dazzled by his novels ANTIPHONY and FRAGILE and the manner in which he seduces/invites the reader to explore our sixth sense – that extension of our thinking that enters the realm of the unconscious or dream state or feelings not accessible immediately to the other five senses. Reading Katsaropoulos it is obvious he believes a reliable critical course can be plotted by following a poetic sixth sense. Chris Katsaropoulos’ mind is so attuned to poetry, classical music, metaphysics, physics, science in general and mans search for meaning that his poems have passages, not unlike cadenzas in a piano concerto where the artist takes a pause from the orchestral score to expound on a note or phrase or thought that shows muscular and spiritual dexterity before returning to the work as a whole, that sing like few other poets can write. It is this gift that Katsaropoulos displays in this masterful work. One of the ways he accomplishes this is his apparent disdain for the confines of phrasing or punctuation or the manner in which he places his poems on the page: once the reader takes the time to read the poems aloud, the myriad levels of meaning surface – levels influenced by the life circumstances and experiences the reader brings to the poem. He writes as though a passing word or phrase or thought draws him to pen and paper and form that initial seed his imagination and stream of conscious sensitivity weave extraordinary images. He allows a certain ambiguity of thought that opens a passage for the reader to enter the creative process, introducing here and there phrases that may be read with several levels of meaning. Gently tucked into his poems are moments of strangely chosen rhyming words that adds to the mysteryof the fluidity of what he is expressing. Make no mistake: once his individual poem is completed the thought process is there: it is the discovery of the process, that idea, that 6th sense place that is the joy of reading his work.Chris Katsaropoulos knows what he is about: he has served in the roles of editor and publisher with such prestigious houses as McGraw-Hill, Pearson Prentice Hall and Macmillan, he has authored trade and technical books (some dealing with the Internet as business) and he and his wife founded Luminis Books after encountering out-of-body experiences. This is a collection of fragments not unlikethe encounters we all face in life – moments that seem coincidental and unimportant at the time but which later lead to insights and even behavior changes completely unexpected. But most of all it is the serene beauty of his writing that mesmerizes and results in starting the book again once finished that proves this is a man of letters who has an enormous gift and future.
~Grady HarpPoet, War Songs Critic, Literary Aficionado, Art Historian, The Art of Man and Vitruvian Lens and PoetsArtistsWriter for art museum catalogues
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