The Presence of One Word

Centuries ago a poet was defined as a singer. Why do we love song? Probably because it so often lifts and opens the heart... and because it can speak that for which the heart has no words. The Presence of One Word does all of this. Andrea Potos's poems capture with graceful insight her wide breadth of belonging, her treasured ties to family and loved friends, to great masters of various arts, to landscapes that shimmer and invite, to small and large details of the everyday as well as the momentous. She belongs because she beholds. To her, these people, places, and observations are vastly more than their literal dimensions-they are genuinely luminous. "It seems I am forever / looking for the thin / place, wishing to glimpse / inside a moment, close enough / to stand sentry to the invisible." Potos does indeed discern the invisible and shares it with us in poem after poem. In making Greek meatballs, she notes that it's not only appetites that "widen with anticipation"-so do spirits "and every holy sense." Girlhood swims are both play and exploring "the surface between air and water, [a] ... threshold between worlds." And in elegant Viennese coffeehouses where time seems to stop, she imbibes more than the delectable beverages, finding in this atmosphere that "grandeur / seeps into your once stagnant thought / you have placed yourself in the dignity / of... what goes on and on and on." It's all in her capacity for deeper vision: "...this is not about the eye / but the heart, and its gates." We come away refreshed by these heart-views, feeling "she is the one, / containing multitudes. / ...with pure light overflowing / through every expansive room." And we find ourselves agreeing with this wise assessment: "Eternity / the woman said of my poems."