Helene Pilibosian

I especially enjoyed her poem “The Giving Fifty” which features a panoramic view of the magnitude of the industry, geography, and beauty of the United States. She spotlights the violets of Rhode Island, the dogwood of Virginia, and the blue bonnets of Texas. She takes the reader to the excitement of the Rose Bowl Parade in California to the jazz clubs of the Deep South, and the vacation lands along the miles of the coast line.

“A New Orchid Myth” is a progression of change, optimistic about the future, realistic about the future, and reflective about the past. A touch of poetic genius.

Richard R. Blake – amazon.com… (mehr)

Suffice it to say that it is Pilibosian's style to avoid clangorous prose, but instead to soften her written memoirs with a front porch swing conversational style that makes her heroic life and background and history and the events of her survival all the more radiant. We are invited to know her family - not just her parents but the cast of Armenians who have struggled in the old country for many years, including the near decimation of a people in the horrors of the early part of the last century. She discusses this, but while commenting on a past history that held such gore she embroiders her history with ethnic traditions, songs and secrets and rituals that cast a broad flavor of the plight of the immigrant known to every citizen of this immigrant collection of forefathers. She dwells on her childhood in Massachusetts and again without beating her chest in agony she lets us understand her position as a minority in the years before the word Tolerance was spoken. She follows her heart (and at one point suffers a cardiac arrest) and is able to glean from every experience she encounters a strength to be true to herself. She achieves a Harvard education, she enters the mystical spaces of Jungian thought, and blends ALL of this to become the writer of note she has become.
Grady Harp… (mehr)

She has a profound respect and understanding of the place of Armenia in world history and for those readers whose knowledge of that country's changing geography and relationship to the great kingdoms and conquerors, Pilibosian has a technique that allows entry into this under-appreciated past.
> But what makes Pilibosian's poetry most interesting and seductive is her interlacing the immigrant experience with the voices of 'those who stayed behind'. Some of these poems, written in a narrative style with a refreshing respect for language as it describes and plays with itself in rhyme, address contemporary issues peculiar to Armenians while others step into the universal arena, a space enlightened by a mind whose focus and devotion has been honed by a respect for roots.
> We are never quite sure how many of Helene Pilibosian's characters are real and how many are convenient creations for poetic dialogue. She can be very first person personal: 'I spilled my American hopes/of many afternoons/on the pavements that wore my life./An Armenian daughter doesn't forget/the name that gets her born,/ the long curls that were shorn.' She can be a resource for history: 'Oral history is a vagrant goat...Orphans were necessary for survival./ America and Europe were the pills....Remembrance is the epitaph/for ghosts of humble glory.'
Grady Harp… (mehr)

The reader of At Quarter Past Reality: New and Selected Poems is quickly drawn in by the quiet, lyrical whispers of Helene Pilibosian's poems. Each tender, haunting echo invites us to settle in and sample the precise, measured tones of a world in which everyday occurrences tell us who we are.
Pilibosian's poems are a study in human behavior with small scenes carefully delineated in well-crafted understatement. Each poem examines a particular moment, revealing the extraordinary in the ordinary.
As the book's title suggests, to read her poetry is to look into her mirror and see beyond the reflection of reality.
Charles Ghigna… (mehr)