Three Poems:
"Immigrant"
"Almond Tree"
"I Will Sleep"
from Tryfon Tolides's
An Almost Pure Empty Walking

Tryfon Tolides:

Tryfon Tolides was born in Korifi Voiou, Greece. He lives and writes in Farmington, Connecticut. He has completed a BFA in Creative Writing at the University of Maine, and a MFA at Syracuse University. He has received a Reynolds Scholarship and the 2004 Foley Poetry Prize.

About An Almost Pure Empty Walking:

The National Poetry Series
Selected by Mary Karr

In his debut collection, chosen by Mary Karr as a winner of the 2005 National Poetry Series, Tryfon Tolides weaves together poems that speak of desire, loss, and small joys. Tolides was born in a tiny village in Greece and his work is rooted in the mountains and wind and the deep interior of that place; his poems express a longing and a searching for peace, for home, for beauty, for escape. These poems constitute a lament, whether they concern themselves with the difficulties of assimilation or the question of whether it is possible for people to live with one another in a spirit of true understanding. They prove that the physical and the metaphysical can share residence, can even be one and the same.

"Tryfon Tolides has followed the territory set out in his native Greece by C. P. Cavafy and later followed (in geography and sensibility) by Jack Gilbert. But Tolides trades the darkness of those poets for a more illuminated grandeur. Tolides is the shaman of epiphany. He makes for his reader keen and particular moments of revelation seized from his fierce and fleshly occupancy on the planet. In the wide-eyed consolation these poems offer up, the starlight they emit, he conjures Tomas Tranströmer and other poets of profound spiritual power. At a time when the planet is in flames, he gives being human a good name."
— Mary Karr

"How he surprises us – this young Greek poet – again and again in these brilliant, Chaplinesque, Zen-soaked, Vermeer-like cameos, craftily echoing Cavafy and William Carlos Williams and Gilbert and others. In the things of this world, which we so often fail to notice, Tolides finds worlds within words, pulling them out of his gypsy bag and holding them up to the light like the tiny diamonds they are, one after the other: the door, the dogs, the barbed wire fence, the dying mother, the holy air. This is his first book and already he has managed to stake out himself – and for us – a brand new, ancient, brave new world."
— Paul Mariani

"It takes a skillful musician, or a poet, to play quietly. Tryfon Tolides's poems have the authority of a pitchless whisper, which lets his readers hear the sounds that are intimate, tender, wounded. His poetic undertaking takes places against two axes: the horizontal journey of civilizations from Greece to the U.S. and the vertical axis, which reaches from underground to the mysteries of the air."
— Bruce Smith

"Because he sees with the humility of a searching heart, on the path to the spring in the village where he was born, on his pizza delivery route in small-town USA, Tryfon Tolides sees us as we are, as souls on pilgrimage in the world. The depth of this attention makes his poems not just consummations of the skill of his extraordinary mind, but revelations of the consequence of being."
— Brooks Haxton

"Lost between his old life in a Greek village and his new life in America, Tryfon Tolides describes the mysteries of the new place and the increasing strangeness of the world he has left behind. Imagistic, interrogative, and often moving, these are the poems in which he finds himself, bringing a fresh and compelling voice to our poetry."
— Wesley McNair

"Tryfon Tolides has written a wonderful book. The poems in An Almost Pure Empty Walking consolidate a quiet in me. There is a disarming range of tone and character, and characters, among the poems. Imaginative, political, provocative. But quiet."
— Michael Burkard

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