Review by Rebecca Jane
The Presence of One Word reawakens a reader’s senses, inviting quiet charms to bloom with meaning. This collection shares deep inner peace that the poet has discovered on her journeys—to a grandmother’s house in Greece, a coffee shop in Vienna, the moor’s resonating with the spirits of the Brontë sisters, and beyond. Andrea Potos is a masterful observer. Her eyes notice a place where the heart of autumn finds rhythm, and she encourages observations to express astonishment, gladness, longing, or love. Her expression has the power to alert us to the poetics of a spider squashed in a book and the ways one word can conjure floral abundance.
Andrea Potos is the recipient of five Outstanding Achievement awards in Poetry from the Wisconsin Library Association. She has written eight full-length poetry collections, including Morrow of Summer and Her Joy Becomes, both notable for their whimsy and wonder but also for their ability to reveal that although life is challenging, it is also eternally precious.
Images arise here, as if their purpose is to conjure a feeling of home: “After our meal of pulled pork and apple pie, / thin-cut chips and wilted greens, sated / to the marrow, we discovered still more—outside, beside a swath of nodding daffodils—a stepping stone bridge over gurgling waters” (36). The speaker of this poem and her companions laugh as they cross, only to discover a “moss haven of woods” that leads on to yet another breathtaking image. After the Yorkshire Dales poem, we land, gently and gladly, “On the Burren” in County Clare, Ireland where “an echoing vastness is everywhere” (39).
Yes, there is plenty to grieve here, too: a dear friend passed away. “How She Might Have Left” considers her passing with profound serenity
Through the revolving door,
the turnstile,
past the swinging gate,
through the sluice gate,
across stepping stones over water,
over the threshold
into the next element
past air and water
and sight—she has stitched herself
with seams of light
These lines, like so many in this collection, carry deliberate tenderness stitched with reflection: the passage from this life to whatever comes next offers a journey for the mind and a soft landing place for the heart. These poems assure us that the presence of a word can accompany us into intimate connection with those we love who merely seem absent because is it not a relief and wonder the way a word can be capable of summoning them present?
The Presence of One Word
by Andrea Potos
Fernwood Press, 75 pages, paper $19 USA
ISBN: 9781594981739
Rebecca Jane is the author of She Bleeds Sestinas, which was a finalist for a Best Book Award in 2023. She works as a freelance writer, ghostwriter, and poet who travels to Asia to study yoga, Sanskrit, and Mandarin. She lives with her daughters on unceded Kumeyaay land. (San Diego, California).