"In Perpetuity" is the second poetry collection by Konstantina Panagiotopoulou published by Kyverti Publications. The collection consists of 71 poems divided into two sections. The first, titled "Dawning", with 36 poems, and the second, "Darkening", with 35 poems.
This separation functions as a perpetual movement like day and night. Light and darkness. Like good and evil. With lived experience, he writes about issues that plague the emotional world of man, culminating in his existential anxieties as mentioned in each verse to keep the interest of the reader intense.
In the first section "Dawning", despite the optimistic theme, she leaves no circumstance to chance without the other aspect of the unexpected as a reversal of the result. Love as a source of joy or happiness, in each verse, elevates the noblest virtues of man, but also as a challenge, it signals the senses through contradictory and often ambiguous emotions to their highest degree. Panagiotopoulou's poetry is highly symbolic and modern in terms of expression and directness of speech, she manages to present every version of an experience that ultimately leads to self-knowledge. That is, to a deep understanding of thoughts, feelings, motivations, and their strengths and weaknesses.
Lively writing. With a sophisticated style in each verse, she projects hopes, expectations, anxieties, loves and rejections. Like a magical sedative, the dynamics of her writing gropes - as if in urgent need - with her fingertips her inner world, filling the blank pages with secret thoughts and desires. Through the unfolding of the theme in both sections, she manages to become penetrating and psychoanalytic as a profound connoisseur of the human soul.
The theme of the poems, in a modern and everyday performance with elements full of anguish, dead ends and questions, seeks redemption through a relationship, through a romance, through a love in order to keep the senses alive as long as possible.
Human actions and tactics that the poetess artfully transforms into allegories, wanting to provoke the reader to stand for a moment in the suspended moment between the beginning of life as a beginning and decay as an end. Where, logically, the human element exists. Positive and negative emotion.
In the poems there is the constant repetition of several words and as an example I mention: body, love, kiss. This proves that their use is not accidental, but they constitute essential elements of the poet's spiritual and sensual world, projecting with her own words and with deep glances at the body, at love, at the kiss her insatiable need for love. The poet, in her effort to discern the light, is measured against her strength, her endurance by looking squarely and searchingly into the darkness.
The body for Konstantina is the basic reference through which all actions are expressed. The one who leaves himself in the hands of the other is defined as an object because he experiences the sharing of his emotional world as an obligation that he must offer to the other. Therefore, his body becomes the symbol of experience with the five senses being recognizable and playing a decisive role in each verse.
poem 5ο
The spoils of your body intact
And I cross its streets.
I want to become a native of your kiss.
under the shadow of your eyelids
to fall asleep.
Another element is the kiss, which signifies security, relief, communication, tenderness, love. A guarantee of continuous emotional security and satisfaction.
poem 15ο
In my small yard, dream flowers bloom
of my youth.
I just smell them and dream.
an eternal spring
full of color and kisses
and beautiful and simple forms
in a world without borders and fences.
In the second section, "Darkening", the poet clearly highlights the great event that is the love. Here, it is not presented as a celebration or salvation or something irresistible like the "love that cannot fight", as Sophocles mentions in Antigone, but as a contradictory, almost ensnaring force, which carries within it promise, but also bitterness, withering, as this is universally based in emotion.
poem 28
Love makes you trip over your feet.
to impose his incurable illness.
Tangible proof that the ephemeral
It is retained undistorted in memory.
Irretrievably plundered lovers
they lose their glory.
Without respite they rest
in what we call love or habit.
Writing overflowing with lyricism, which does not alienate or tire, because it has the weight of self-control of experiential experience. It is precisely this self-control with the skill of artistic linguistic composition that gives the poetic quality of her personal style, defining the rich spiritual and sensitively cultivated world of the poetess.
The technical performance of K.P. as an art of communication, is at the level of essence the most genuine, the deepest and creative encounter of man with man, which leads the poetess to a continuous search. This search seems to be completed by the sense of loneliness which the poetess feels that she is redeemed by the very poetry that she creates and functions as a magnet of an ineffable security. Through poetry, her ideal, her inevitable path is traced, the private one that is exhausted not only in the space of the truly permissible but also in the sphere of utopia.
Poetry for K.P. constitutes a challenge for a deeper inner assessment as her technique of speech contains many points where emotion dominates as a mystical act seemingly independent of the world of matter, yet placing her in direct communication with the essence of things.
Thus, her poetry is the search for truth through the most important concepts that mark our lives. Romance. Love. Pain. Death. Freedom.
This sacred play on words, along with her sense of personal fulfillment, creatively transforms speech into tangible reality.
