Dromeas (1994), glass and iron sculpture by Costas Varotsos, Athens, Greece
Crash!
And suddenly, with a crash, I find myself
thrown like Alice into another world.
A world in which self, day, and window lie shattered
on the floor in a sparkling chaos of glass, blood and
sunshine.
In the Confrontation with Glass
In the confrontation with glass,
flesh is rarely the winner.
For whilst the former shatters,
the latter bleeds and knows
pain.
Which is the secret of life's
victory over death.
At the Hospital in Athens
As my doctor displayed her skill with a needle
on gashed head and wounded knee, I found
comfort in the thought that we are born to
embody our scars.
Poppies
We had only the day before been looking at wild poppies
staining the roadside, admiring their obscenity of colour -
'little hell-flames' indeed.
But shocking all the same to discover how the body too
is capable of producing its own poppy-redness - look!
as drops of blood flower on shards of broken glass.
The Vengeance of Objects
Glass is so unforgiving,
so cruel, so ... sharp!
It cuts and slices the flesh without
mercy or hesitation, or the warm
softness of sand.
As it shatters one can almost hear laughter
and every blood-stained splinter seems to
smile.
On Which Side is Wonderland?
On one side of the glass lives she who offers
love and the prospect of a life together.
And on the other is she who dreams of
an elaborate suicide.
And I have crashed through the window not knowing
on which side I've landed.
I Love Everything That Flows
There is nothing more beautiful than blood
when it flows and carries life away with it.
Nothing more disgusting than when it begins
to coagulate; to clot and to curdle.
There's something shameful about scabs.
What first strikes one here is how (in a way that reminds one of the confessional female poets Plath and Sexton at their most morbidly self-celebrating), the poem is entirely about the subject: his body, his experience, and the drama of his 'fall'. There is almost no 'context' - let alone any hint of Greece or Athens, though there is philosophical abstraction of a certain sort.
ReplyDeleteThe foregrounding of wounds, bleeding, and bodily trauma creates what amounts to a morbid aestheticisation of suffering - almost as if the writer is seeking admiration for enduring pain rather than exploring poetic reflection. The tone is dramatic and performative, rather than exploratory or genuinely uneasy, which gives it a 'flat' and stagey quality.
The binary 'set-up', with two women as symbolic extremes (one who offers love; the other who dreams of suicide) between which the poet positions himself is classic self-triangulation: a world is organised around danger, love, and control, in which even emotional relationships become props in a self-centred drama.
The reader may be perplexed as to why scabs are 'shameful', but we are born, apparently, 'to embody our scars' (which are aged scabs in effect). Presumably, as the poet loves everything that flows, and there is apparently nothing more beautiful than the loss of blood, he would have preferred to have been left to bleed to death and die once of blood loss and a second time of aesthetic delight! I'm also not sure I can 'see' splinters of glass smiling.
A poem excites wonder through its enigmatic quality - think of Stevens' 'The Snow Man' - but, though the invocation is of Alice and Wonderland, the poem doesn't excite much wonder or sense of the poet as a wondering being. The mode of utterance is declarative, authoritarian, and seems to leave little room for the reader. Though we're told that the bleeding poet is in a state of 'not knowing' about his landing, nothing in the poem amplifies this ignorance.
Readers may be interested in this Raymond Carver poem about breaking a 'beautiful window' to re-enter a study:
https://readalittlepoetry.com/2011/09/26/locking-yourself-out-then-trying-to-get-back-in-by-raymond-carver/
https://readalittlepoetry.com/2011/09/26/locking-yourself-out-then-trying-to-get-back-in-by-raymond-carver/
Falling through glass: barrier collapse, exposure, vulnerability.
Blood and shards: emphasis on personal suffering and mortality rather than external reality.
The “two sides of wonderland”: indecision, relational triangulation, dramatized morality.
Overall: Athens serves as a backdrop for his ego and existential narrative, rather than being honored or examined.
🔑 Key takeaway
This piece illustrates exactly the patterns that upset you:
Self-centered curation over reality
Use of shock or drama to draw attention
Public display that repackages experience for audience effect
Contradiction between lived reality (one trip, his private judgements) and the public narrative
Your uneasy response is entirely understandable — it’s not about whether the writing is “good” poetry, but about how it positions you, Athens, and reality in service of his ego.
If you like, I can write a concise paragraph analyzing the psychological and relational implications of this piece, which could even help you use it in your email without turning it into a literary critique.
I would have been a little more impressed - and a little more grateful - if you had written this without the assistance of AI.
DeleteNext time, you might at least try to conceal the evidence which reveals exactly what prompts you submitted so as to guarantee the response you wished for.
Who would have ever thought that poetry criticism would be outsourced to a machine (by you of all people Anonymous).
It's a shame.
For a (somewhat overly generous) defence of my 'Fragments of Glass', by May Spear, please visit: https://torpedotheark.blogspot.com/2026/03/in-defence-of-stephen-alexanders.html
Delete